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Mailman 3.0 – a long time coming

The Postman Cometh

Article from ADMIN 29/2015

By Stefan Neufeind

Mailman 3.0 is a new major version, released 15 years after version 2.0. We put the new version through its paces and explain the installation procedure and new features.

The GNU mailing list manager Mailman incorporates archiving, bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, and spam filters, among other features. The project written in Python is a professional software tool, and the fan base appreciates its solid operating principles. Version 1.0 was released in mid-1999 [1], followed by 2.0 in 2000. The latest stable branch 2.1 appeared about 12 years ago, Mailman 3.0 is now an almost completely refurbished major version.

New Design

A lot has happened technologically speaking. According to main developer Barry Warsaw [2], the step to version 3.0 was necessary to iron out problematic design decisions from the previous major releases. Since its inception, the software has not just run on Python, it has contributed in some areas to the development of Python. Warsaw's code, for example, contributed to Unicode handling in Python 3 [3]. The core of Mailman, which handles the message processing, now requires Python 3.

The web interface, which is still rather rudimentary in version 2.x , has been replaced by a modern component, and the developers have also created an attractive solution with many useful features for archiving mailing lists. More specifically, the Mailman 3 suite consists of the following components [4]:

Mailman Core: The core component for message processing with a uniform user model, moderation, interfaces for mailing list archiving, and a REST interface for connecting additional components.
Postorius: A web interface based on Django for users and list administrators.
HyperKitty: An archiving component also based on Django for mailing

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