[mailman3] make mailman3 run without qmail files

[noave]

to make mailman3 future prove we need to find a solution to make it work without using the qmail files. Mailman should have other metthods to receive mails or to lookup a mailbox via IMAP.

Maybe you have any ideas about this @rikroe as the original author of the guide?

[rikroe]

Unfortunately, cannot help directly. My need for using mailing lists is gone so I haven't looked into the topic.

I think that uberespace uses Dovecot, so this could be of interest. However I'm not sure if we as users are even able to make the necessary changes.

[unite42]

possibel solution could be:

• create a "uberspace.py" for mailman core to use the uberspace mail commands for the creation of the needed mailbox or/and alias forwards by mailman

and

1. lookup the mailbox(es) via IMAP using fetchmail and configure fetchmail to hand them over to Mailman via lmtp

   or

2. use a script or programm to fetch the mails from the Mailboxes maildir in ~/users^1 and hand mails over to Mailman via lmtp

---

Collection of links:

uberspace.py

• Mailmancore folder for mta-scripts: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/tree/master/src/mailman/mta
• Mailman Interface for mail transport agent integration: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/blob/master/src/mailman/interfaces/mta.py
• Alias Overview: https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/runners/docs/OVERVIEW.html
• uberspace mail commands:
  • https://manual.uberspace.de/mail-mailboxes/#Mailboxes
  • https://manual.uberspace.de/mail-forwarding/#configuring-forwards

Mailboxes maildir

• Salmon - A Python Mail Server cli: https://salmon-mail.readthedocs.io/en/latest/commandline.html#salmon-blast
• Script?: https://mailing.postfix.users.narkive.com/lBeGQxs7/resend-emails-from-a-maildir

[pheraph]

As Uberspace 8 will drop support for qmail, all mailman setups will break:

Ahoy Ubernaut,

you are using .qmail files with special configurations, which we cannot easily adopt in our future default mail setup.

The support of .qmail files is a legacy feature of Uberspace 6. Until the end of life of Uberspace 7, your current configuration will work as usual. For a migration to the future Uberspace 8 you will have to solve the displayed errors to avoid problems.

Has anyone tried setting up Mailman without qmail? Or uses an alternative?

[heiglandreas]

Thought about mlmmj? IIRC it can work with different backends. Not sure though it works within the Uberspace shared setup...

[nichtmax]

We found a script by @christianbur which might just do the job, we haven't tested yet though: Script, Configuration

It runs as a daemon that supports IMAP IDLE, gets mails via IMAP and forwards them via LMTP. With Mailman in particular, users previously had to create an extra script that received the mails from .qmail via a pipe and then spoke LMTP at the end; here it would just access via IMAP and replace the previous extra script for this, so it wouldn't even make anything more complicated. The config is trivial, essentially “IMAP server and auth data + LMTP server data”.

[frafl]

I created a pull request for a solution using sieve (actually optional) and fetchmail: https://github.com/Uberspace/lab/pull/1769 This does pretty much what @nichtmax describes (bad luck: I started this a week ago and didn't check here again).