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I wanted to share information with friends about my hobby and mailinglists are a very useful tool to achieve this. Everybody just send eMails to the mailinglist and it will be sent to everybody who subscribed to the mailinglist.
 
There are a lot of mailinglist providers available in the net but there is a major drawback: These providers want to earn money and use the eMail addresses of the subscribers. Either they insert dump adverticements in the eMails or the eMail addresses are distributed to other parties which will send advertisment eMails. I want my friends protect against spam emails so I decided to set up a mailing list server on my local desktop with mailman.  
 
Prerequisites:
 
1) A domain where you can define an arbitrary number of new eMail addresses
2) fetchmail installed
3) postfix installed
4) maiman installed
5) optional - local apache  installation to maintain the mailinglist with a web GUI
 
Just follow the description on  Running GNU mailman at home. There are some details missing which are explained below:
 
Assumtions for configuration parameters:
1) Mailinglist is called mailinglist.
2) eMail of the mailinglist is called This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
3) pop3 user to fetch eMails to the mailinglist is called mailuser
4) local user running fetchmail is called localuser
 
1)  It's important to have following lines in main.cf of postfix:
   alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases
2) mailman doesn't create definitions in  /etc/alias an, if you create a new mailinglist with
   newlist foo
That has to be done manually and finally
   newalias
has to be invoked.
The contents of /etc/alias should be
mailinglist:              "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post mailinglist"
mailinglist-admin:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman admin mailinglist"
mailinglist-bounces:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces mailinglist"
mailinglist-confirm:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman confirm mailinglist
mailinglist-join:         "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join mailinglist"
mailinglist-leave:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman leave mailinglist"
mailinglist-owner:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman owner mailinglist"
mailinglist-request:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman request mailinglist"
mailinglist-subscribe:    "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe mailinglist"
mailinglist-unsubscribe:  "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe mailinglist"
 
Now fetchmail has to be confugured accordingly .fetchmailrc
 
set syslog
set postmaster "mailuser"
set bouncemail
set no spambounce
set softbounce
set properties ""
poll pop.linuxmailing.de with proto POP3
       user 'mailing@
linuxmailing.de there with password 'geheim'
       to 'mailinglist@
linuxmailing.de'=''mailinglist'
          '
'mailinglist-admin@linuxmailing.de'=''mailinglist-admin'
         
'mailinglist-bounces@linuxmailing.de'='mailinglist-bounces'
         
'mailinglist-confirm@linuxmailing.de'=''mailinglist-confirm'
         
'mailinglist-join@linuxmailing.de'=''mailinglist-join'
         
'mailinglist-leave@linuxmailing.de'=''mailinglist-leave'
         
'mailinglist-owner@linuxmailing.de'=''mailinglist-owner'
          '
'mailinglist-request@linuxmailing.de'=''mailinglist-request'
          '
'mailinglistThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.'=''mailinglist-subscribe'
          '
'mailinglist-unsubscribe@linuxmailing.de'=''mailinglist-unsubscribe'
          '*'='localuser'
       here options fetchall
 
Finally cron has to configured to fetch the eMails of the mailinglist in a regular interval (The examples does this every 5 minutes).
 
0-59/5 * * * *       /usr/bin/fetchmail >> /home/localuser/fetchmail.log 2>&1 
 
Problems with mailman config:
1) When I started mailman I got an error message telling me the gid is not OK. There exist two two files which define the gid for the webfrontend and eMail access:
/etc/mailman/mailman.cgi-gid
/etc/mailman/mailman.mail-gid
I had to adapt them manually.
2) mailman requires a mailinglist mailman. This list will be created automatically by mailman. I deleted the list because I thought I don't need it. But then no mailinglist doesn't work any more. Just keep this mailinglist.
3) On Ubuntu/Mint the emails for mailman were not fetched by fetchmail until the following line was added in .fetchmailrc in the poll statement
    no dns aka linuxmailing.de 
 
Useful links:
 
Ubuntu help: Mailman  
 
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