Setting up mailing lists ....

[John Shott]

Bill and Mike:

Well, I think that I've finally learned a thing or two about qmail and how it
"knows" who owns mailing lists, where they live, etc.

There is a file /var/qmail/users/assign that is created by doing:
cat /etc/passwd > qmail-pw2u

1. This gererates a long list of lines that, in effect, says that mail sent to
username should be delivered to username and is owned by username.

2. Mail that is sent to username-anything is a mailing list owned by username
and should also be owned by username.

3. Anything else "may be" a mailing list owned by alias.

The problem was that we have a user named coral so my attempts to make up a
mailing list named "coral" failed becuase it was delivered to the coral user.
Attempts to make a list named coral-developer (owned by alias) failed because
it assumed that coral owned the list but couldn't find it under ~coral.

However, I can put a file in /var/qmail/users/exclude that contains the single
line:
coral

When I re-generate the /var/qmail/users/assign ... and then run qmail-newu
which converts the ascii file /var/qmail/users/assign into some sort of binary
database named /var/qmail/users/cdb ... coral is no longer a name that can
receive mail as a user.  Therefore, it is now possible to generate the mailing
list named coral (owned by alias) with the command:

ezmlm-make -ia ~alias/MLs/coral ~alias/.qmail-coral coral snf.stanford.edu

This should be done as alias ....

Then, I think that qmail needs to be restarted with the command:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail restart
(Yes, the script to start and stop qmail is named sendmail ... go figure).

Now, I think that I've got only a couple of remaining mysteries ...
Most of the directories in /var/qmail/alias/MLs ... that is the mailing list
directores and their subdirectories have "mode" 2700 ... rwx--S---
I think that is setgid but I don't know why, if it has to be that way,

Also, I'm not sure that all of the mailing lists are being archived
incrementally ... 

But, I think that I now know more about qmail that I did ... and probably more
than I want to.

Talk to you later,

John