Mailing Lists

The CentOS Project hosts some public mailing lists that people can subscribe to.

It's hosted at https://lists.centos.org and on a sponsored node.

Due to the fact that it was created (back in time decision) on the centos.org MX machine , the lists are using the @centos.org domain, and so mailman is hosted on the main centos mailserver, reason why the postfix ansible role will have the postfix_mailman variable boolean set to True, as it will automatically create the <list>@centos.org aliases on the host (needed to pass through mailman)

Some links:

• Upstream mailman 2 documentation
• mailman ansible role

Worth knowing that to initially fight against spam registration, we added a recaptcha option to filter massive users registration. You can find the applied patches (collaboration between Red Hat, Gnome and CentOS, all using the same applied patch for their mailman2 lists) in the mailman role

The CentOS Theme (written by the Artwork SIG) is also pushed from ansible role and some elements can be modified through mailman_html_tpl_{head,bodystart,bodyclose} variables. (also all coming from the ansible mailman role

Some operations

Adding a new list for a project/SIG

The Ansible mailman role supports adding lists automatically so it's just a matter of , through ansible inventory, adding new list to the mailman_lists ansible list variable with some parameters like :

• name: the mailman list name
• description: list description appearing on mailman ui
• password: unique password for that list, as we can have specific operators for that list
• admin: the email address of the list owner

Once pushed to git and applied by ansible, the new list will appear

Modifying lists settings

If the setting you want to modify is one of the previously mentioned variables, updating in git/ansible would then trigger a reconfig with these settings.

But some settings are just configured through mailman itself, so to modify these ones, you need either the password list (specific to that list), or the whole mailman_admin_pass (also called site password, that can be used to admin all lists)

To do this, just browse the mailman admin UI, select your list and auth with the needed password.

You can then proceed with changes like, adding/removing subscribers, work with moderation queue, etc, etc ..