Mailing list archiving

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

First, let me clear up a myth.  Mailman doesn't require any specific 
mail transport agent.  There is no reason why it won't work with Qmail, 
Postfix, etc.  For some reason, Debian really likes pushing exim4.  If 
you install a dummy package providing mail-transport-agent or install 
the Qmail binary package generated from the Debian qmail-src package, 
you're fine.  It probably said that it depends on exim4 or 
mail-transport-agent.  I've been running Qmail since 2004 and tried to 
set up Mailman.  I admit that ezmlm is vastly easier but I never set up 
web archives because of the security issues.

The same applies with mhonarc.  It should integrate with any mailer or 
mailing list.  It even works on Usenet articles.  You can customize its 
output to some degree.  Basically you pass it the raw message text as 
the mail is received and it automatically converts it to html and 
updates its indexes.  I don't know if you're using vpopmail or similar 
with Qmail, but you could call mhonarc as part of the qmailqueue 
environment variable if you want all mail archived or only make it part 
of the ezmlm or mailing list user.  I've not used it on an actual 
production mailing list but I have used it on some news articles for 
testing.  The FAQ should give instructions to add to ezmlm.  Based on my 
setup here, I think you would do something like this in your .qmail file:

|/usr/bin/mhonarc
|ezmlm-whatever

Obviously, read the dot-qmail (5) man page and the mhonarc docs for full 
details.  Our mailing list never got off the ground, so archiving wasn't 
much of an issue.  I'm not familiar with ezmlm-browse, but I hope it 
masks addresses from spammers.