The GNU Mailing List Manager
What is Mailman?
Mailman is software to help manage email discussion lists, much like Majordomo and Smartmail. Unlike most similar products, Mailman gives each mailing list a web page, and allows users to subscribe, unsubscribe, etc. over the web. Even the list manager can administer his or her list entirely from the web. Mailman also integrates most things people want to do with mailing lists, including archiving, mail-to-news gateways, and so on. See the features page for a brief overview of features.

Mailman has all of the features you expect from such a product, plus integrated support for the web (including web based archiving), automated bounce handling and integrated spam prevention.

Mailman is free software. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Getting Mailman
Before you can run Mailman, you need to download and install the Python programming language (version 1.5 or later).

The first GNU release is not out yet. For now, you can get the last pre-GNU beta release (1.0rc2, released Jun 14 1999) here.

Support
The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) is available to answer most questions. For issues not covered in the FAQ, please post your questions to the Mailman-Users mailing list. You might also want to check out the Mailman Users mailing list archive to see if your problem has already been addressed.

Please use the Jitterbug database to submit bug reports to the core developers.

Mailing Lists
We have several mailing lists devoted to Mailman, which also provide a nice demonstration of Mailman!
  • Mailman Announce is a read-only list that you can subscribe to if you are only interested in release notices and other important news. Only the core Mailman developers can post messages to this list.
  • Mailman Users is the mailing list to subscribe to if you are using Mailman at your site, and may have problems or questions relating to installation, use, etc. We'll try to keep the deep technical discussions off this list.
  • Mailman Developers is the mailing list to use if you are interested in helping us develop Mailman, discuss future directions, etc. This is the list for more in-depth technical issues.
  • Mailman Checkins is an adjunct list to the publically accessible read-only CVS repository. This list is for the hardcore developers, or anybody else submitting patches, since we really prefer such patches to be generated against the latest snapshot. This is a read-only list; only the core Mailman developers can post messages to this list. There is no archive.

    You may also want to find a project on our Mailman TODO list.

Mailman in the News
Mailman was featured in a cover story article in the March 1999 issue of SunWorld. The article was written by Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz.

Mailman was briefly mentioned in a ZDNet article on Linux. This was picked up by MSNBC (I won't comment on the irony there).

Logo Contest
The logo contest has concluded, and by a narrow margin, Dragon's logo has won. Starting with Mailman 1.0rc1, the standard Mailman generated web pages will include the logo with a link to www.list.org.

Here are all the other logo contributions for your enjoyment!
Large Logo
Small Logo
Heidi Henderson
Alexander Deyke (animated)
Alexander Deyke
The Dragon De Monsyne
Khris