6.11. Mailman and CPanel
A lot of folks use Mailman through cPanel, and they come to the Mailman mailing lists for help when they have trouble. There's usually little we can do to help with these specific problems, and you should contact your hosting provider or cPanel for assistance. If they contact us, we'll work with them as necessary to fix any bugs in Mailman that affect its use with cPanel. This is a problem similar to the issue with Mailman and Plesk.
Here's some information provided by cPanel for the Mailman FAQ:
The primary place [for support] would be our forums http://forums.cpanel.net/ That's the most public place we have for airing problems with cPanel and usually we try to make sure there's resolutions to those problems. If it's a more specific problem they can put a support ticket in with us at http://support.cpanel.net/ (The support site also has links to our forums, faq page, documentation, and access to submit bugs and feature requests)
One site admin using cPanel suggests that the cPanel support mentioned above is really meant for hosting COMPANIES using cPanel, not end users doing so. Your hosting company should be your best solution there. If they're not much help when building Mailman, perhaps you shouldn't be using them, because there are plenty of hosting companies that DO support their users.
Note that cPanel frequently installs their customized version of Mailman along with the Exim MTA, so check the other FAQ entries regarding Exim if you're having problems (e.g., try searching the documentation for 'exim'). They may or may not be useful to you, but it wouldn't hurt to look at them.
If you're having problems with messages not getting out to your members, you may not have direct access to the level of information needed to debug the problem, but you should at least check out 4.78 Troubleshooting- No mail going out to lists members. Some users having problems with moderated lists have discovered that they needed to upgrade the version of Python installed on the server they are using, but achieving this goal may require additional assistance from cPanel or your service provider.
If you are getting "we hit a bug" responses from Mailman's web UI, it is normally not possible to diagnose the problem without the information from Mailman's error log, but one user recently reported:
I was able to resolve the issue. It turned out it was a security setting in the VPS' configuration "tweaks":
EXPERIMENTAL: Jail Apache Virtual Hosts using mod_ruid2 and cPanel® jailshell.
It was set to "On" and by setting it to "Off" everything began working normally again.
The following information (provided by a cPanel/Mailman user, not the cPanel group themselves) should be helpful to those of you using Mailman with cPanel:
1. For the examples below, consider a list whose address is listname@yourdomain.com and which is created using the cPanel web frontend.
2. Its REAL name inside Mailman will be listname_yourdomain.com, not listname, the way it would be in a normal Mailman installation. This is because there's only one installation on the shared host you're using, and this is what separates your <listname> from the other guy's <listname>. You can see this in a number of places. First, you can see it in the URL used to admin the list. Notice that it's <sitename>/mailman/admin/listname_yourdomain.com. Second, if you have access to the command line and want to administer the list that way, you'll need to use the full name as the listname.
3. Its "alias" will be <listname>. You'll see the alias displayed in the HTML text of the admin interface, and in some commands on the command line (e.g. ./list_lists). That name is only for information, display purposes it can't be used for anything else.
4. If you're lucky enough to be able to access it, the Mailman installation directory ($prefix) is /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman. You'll find commands like list_lists, add_members, find_members, etc in ./bin. In cgi-bin, you'll find BINARIES (not python code). These binaries are what cPanel uses to perform the listname_domain.com to listname conversion. It lets you talk short names while passing the long name to Mailman.
5. If you do want to see the long names of the lists for your site, pass the -b -V <domain> arguments to list_lists:
./list_lists -b -V <yourdomain.com>
6. All of this mumbo-jumbo is why you can't create lists in the normal way if you're using the cPanel web frontend (cPanel -> Mail -> Mailing Lists -> Create New List). The web frontend has the advantage that it handles everything for you, including making the aliases entries for your list and all that good stuff. But if you want your lists to have URLs like <sitename>/mailman/admin/listname instead of <sitename>/mailman/admin/listname_yourdomain.com, you'll need to create them from the command line, if you have access to it. From /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/bin, try:
./newlist --urlhost=subdomain.domain.tld listname
7. If you're using Joomla! as your CMS, there's a nice Joomla! component that is cpanel-friendly. Read about it at http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,2409/Itemid,35/.
Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard
This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.