Hello mailman users out there -
I have been a casual user of mailman for 21 years now I think it is. Most of my lists were super small (my only current lists have no more than 8 members each), super low volume. It's "just worked" over the years, no issues. I have been using Linux since 1996, not a newbie here. 21 years ago I deployed mailman as part of our corporate email and then there were a lot more users. Since that time I just use mailman on my personal server.
I did a apt-get dist-upgrade on my system and was surprised to see mailman had vanished. Wasn't expecting that.. not a big deal, or so I thought.
I am running Devuan 4, which is based on Debian. Investigating further it seems Debian at some point dropped Mailman 2.1 and started including Mailman 3. OK, not too bad I thought..
I was/am prepared to start my mailing lists from scratch again, manually copy/paste over settings/users/etc. Don't care about archives etc. I setup mailman 2.1 on another Devuan 3.x system and copied my mailman configs over to it, and can view them fine via the mailman cgi scripts through Apache, I was planning on just copy/pasting list settings between the two systems for each list.
Roughly 10-15mins into trying to get mailman3 off the ground I just find myself overwhelmed. That doesn't happen often. I'm honestly completely shocked at how it seems the complexity of the system has increased by orders of magnitude.
I have been browsing around https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/pre-installation-guide.html (and other links on that documentation site)
But as much information as there is, to me there really isn't any information there. If that makes sense. I'm sure it doesn't make sense so let me give an example.
On this page: https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/config-web.html
I assume that would lead me to how do I configure the web interface so I can do stuff with it.
I setup an admin account, then it goes into scheduled tasks(which appear to be handled by the Debian package already but don't know what these tasks would have to do with a web interface). I tried sending a test email but that failed, I looked at the setting up email portion but it does not give any indication where that config would be stored, a recursive grep on /etc for EMAIL_BACKEND turns up nothing (there is a /etc/mailman3 directory with some files in there).
Then it goes into other things like task queues, full text searching, here I am just looking for info on where this web interface is, where is the config, what port does it listen on? Is it a cgi like mailman2? It seems like it could be a standalone service.
Then it shows a bunch of other settings, not indicating what file these are stored in(or what directory the file is in), etc etc etc. Debian's own documentation is severely lacking in this department as well, normally I am used to going to /usr/share/doc/<package>/ and there is some useful stuff. There is stuff for mailman3 but it's minimal at best.
So I'm thinking mailman3 is not the package for me. I've really appreciated mailman 2.1 (and earlier versions) as I said they always just worked, never had to think about them. I'm sure a lot of good hard work has been put into 3, I just don't recall the last time I looked at a project and just honestly didn't even know where to begin which surprised me so much given my 20+ year history of mailman as a user and as an admin.
Is there some document(s) out there that would be more beneficial to me in setting up mailman3? I see that mailman 2 looks like it's still being maintained, I assume mailman3 is the result of python3 code and mailman2 perhaps uses python 2.7? I am unsure on the ability to run mailman2 on a modern Debian-based distro since of course Python 2.7 is pretty obsolete at this point (or maybe Mailman 2.1 doesn't use python I don't recall). I could try to install the older mailman 2.1 package on Devuan 4 and see what happens I don't know if it would be that simple or not.
Or is there a better MLM for simple use cases? I used Majordomo back in the 90s and was happy to get onto Mailman from that. Something similar to Mailman 2.1 in features/functionality. Worst case I could just use aliases in my postfix config at the end of the day that is all that is really needed, though I do like some level of access control on who can email the lists(even if nobody outside the list knows the list exists), I've had some of these lists for 2 decades, old habits die hard right?
I did some searches for mailing list software on the Debian package archives and saw a few options, nothing really stood out at me as something super interesting yet though.
I don't mean to come across as harsh or complaining or anything I'm just here in shock kind of. Thinking about what the best solution for me would be. My mailing lists have been broken for a couple of weeks but that's really not a big deal.
thanks
nate