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4.47. Virtual domain hosting with Mailman?

From a recent thread on the mailman-users mailing list (see <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2004-June/037419.html>), Richard Barrett said:

 With unmodified, standard Mailman source code, there is a single
 namespace for list names shared by all virtual host supported by a
 given Mailman installation. Multiple installations on the same machine
 can be used to avoid the list naming restrictions this creates.

 The modified version of Mailman, shipped by Cpanel as part of their
 commercial hosting product for ISPs, adopts a different,
 list-name-munging solution to the problem but Cpanel have not made the
 modified source code generally available in the public domain.

See http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-January/041752.html for more information about the cPanel patch.

I would like to add that running the CPanel software, or hosting your list at CPanel, will require that you get all your Mailman support from them. See Mailman and CPanel for details.

Another option would be to look at patches to try to supply this kind of functionality with older versions of Mailman. Looking through the set of Mailman patches on Launchpad, we find https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/558126, which was developed for use under Debian stable with their binary package version 2.1.1-5.1 of Mailman. However, this patch may require significant effort to get it to work with more modern versions of Mailman (e.g., 2.1.5). (As of March, 2005, there is a link in a comment in this patch to a 2.1.5 version of the patch)

Searching the archives of the mailman-users mailing list will likely turn up other discussions of this subject, especially the thread at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2004-June/037443.html, which is another excellent discussion of the subject by Richard Barrett.

There is a recent thread in the mailman-developers archives leading up to the post at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2006-March/018629.html in which Hans Ulrich Niedermann describes his work in this area including links to his patches (http://nix.lauft.net/htdocs/mailman/). These patches and additional fixes have been ported forward to Mailman 2.1.13 in the Bazaar branch at https://code.launchpad.net/~msapiro/mailman/vhost.

This is due for integration into Mailman 3.0.

The recommended method to support multiple virtual hosts without list name collisions with Mailman 2.1.x is to run a separate Mailman instance for each virtual host.

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.