Requirements

Mailman currently runs only on Unix-y systems, such as GNU/Linux, Solaris, *BSD, etc. It should work on MacOSX but not earlier versions of MacOS. It probably does not work on Windows, although it's possible you could get it running on a Cygwin system (please let the developer community know if you have success with this!)

Before you can run Mailman, you need to make sure that Python is installed. Mailman requires at least Python 1.5.2 and is known to work with Python 1.6 and Python 2.0. Most GNU/Linux systems come with Python pre-installed, so you just need to make sure you're running an up-to-date version. You can do this by executing the following at your shell's command line:

% python
Python 2.0 (#128, Oct 18 2000, 04:48:44) 
[GCC egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)] on linux2
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> ^D

You will also need a mail server (a.k.a. SMTP server, mail transport agent or MTA) for mail delivery and reception. Mailman is MTA-agnostic, meaning it should work with just about any mail server. Among the servers used by the Mailman community include Postfix, Exim, Sendmail, and Qmail.

You will need a web server. Apache is certainly the most popular, is available for all Unix systems, and works great with Mailman.

To install Mailman from the sources, you will also need an ANSI C compiler. The GNU C compiler gcc 2.8.1 or later is known to work well.

Downloading

Version (2.0.11, released on May 20 2002) is the current GNU release. It is available from the following mirror sites:

• From GNU
• From List.Org
• From SourceForge

% cd /usr/local/src
% tar zxf mailman.tar.gz

% gunzip -c mailman.tar.gz | tar xf -