Revision 11 as of 2018-05-27 21:42:39

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Introduction

I have now installed Mailman 3 for production on two different servers. This is intended to be documentation of my decisions and experiences in doing so. It will be more of a narrative than a how-to, but I hope a how-to can be distilled from it.

The two servers are lists.mailman3.org (lm3o) and mail.python.org (mpo). Pre-existing things on those servers forced some decisions which were different between them, but the actual MM 3 installation was pretty much up to me, yet I did it differently the second time due to things I thought I'd learned the first time.

A fundamental step in any installation is to ensure that you have the necessary infrastructure for reliably sending mail. This mostly involves DNS records. I won't go into detail, but you need an A and maybe AAAA record for your MAIL FROM domain and rDNS PTR records for the IPs pointing back to the domain. You may also need an MX record for your email domain pointing to the Mailman server. Also good is a mechanism for DKIM signing outgoing mail and DKIM and SPF records for the domain.

This already existed on mpo, but needed to be set up on lm3o.

lm3o is the same server as mirror.list.org/mirror.mailman3.org. This is a mirror of the GNU Mailman web site and was already set up using nginx as a web server. Thus, the MM 3 installation here uses nginx as the web server proxying to gunicorn for WSGI support.

Update

I have done a significant reinstallation on both servers. The prior version of this page is no longer applicable to these servers. I will be updating this page with more information about the current installs as time goes forward.