[MM3-users] starting mailman2 under Debian

March 22, 2026


      It took me several hours to figure out how to start Mailman2.1 on a Debian
system, where it is package is run as list. It complained it could not
open the pid file.

## file: /etc/systemd/system/mailman.service
[Unit]
Description=GNU Mailman Mailing List Manager
After=syslog.target network.target
[Service]
Type=forking
User=list
Group=list
RuntimeDirectory=mailman
PIDFile=/run/mailman/mailman.pid
ExecStart=/usr/lib/mailman/bin/mailmanctl -s start
ExecStop=/usr/lib/mailman/bin/mailmanctl stop
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Hopefully this will save some good folks' time!
--
Written by Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel on his 22206th day.