Working with MinorDomo Revision as of Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 10:57 UTC

MinorDomo is a “minimalistic replacement for
MajorDomo”. In this guide:

I have my MinorDomo lists at /home/minordomo
I’ll be creating a list called developers@example.com
- All messages sent to this list will be archived
- Only individuals on the list can send messages to the list (i.e. it’s not ‘open’)

Creating a new mailing list

First copy over the sample list to the MinorDomo lists folder:

cd /home/minordomo
cp -r /usr/doc/minordomo-0.6.1/sample-list developers

Here’s a table of entities in the folder you just copied. Keep in that some of
these might not exist!

Name	Type	Function
`list`	File	Contains email addresses, one per line
`footer`	File	Contains text which is to be appended to every message sent to this list (e.g. disclaimer, unsubscribe info). Can use placeholders for administrator email (`\a`), domain name (`\d`), mailing list name (`\l`, sans domain), lisr URI (`\u`).
`info`	File	Information on the list. Obtained by an email to the list with subject line “info developers”
`one-liner`	File	A one-line description of the list
`config`	File	List configuration file. If present, overrides `/etc/minordomo.conf` Two important directives: `open_lists=none` makes this a ‘closed’ list `subject_prefix=[Developers List]` gives each message a prefix “Developers List”
`archive`	Directory	All messages sent to the list are saved in this folder. It is not created when you copy the sample list above. Messages are stored in YYYY/MM/DD/ sub-folders. You can get awesome HTML output with HyperMail

Once you’re done editing things to your heart’s content, change the permissions to nobody:nobody.

Then add the following to /etc/aliases:

  developers: "|/usr/sbin/minordomo.pl developers"

Rebuild the aliases DB by issuing newaliases

Now test the list with an email.

Working with MinorDomo Lists

Sending an email to minordomo@example.com with the following subject lines does a variety of things:

Subject Line	Action
subscribe `<list>`	subscribes to a mailing list
unsubscribe `<list>`	unsubscribes from a mailing list
info [`<list>`]	gets information on a list or server
list `<list>`	returns a subscriber list if enabled

Sample HyperMail Script

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

umask 0000;

$archive_dir = "/home/minordomo/archive";
$output_dir = "/home/minordomo/archive/html";

@years = `ls $archive_dir`;
chomp @years;

foreach $year (@years) {

        unless (-e "$output_dir/$year") {
                mkdir "$output_dir/$year";
        }
        `find $archive_dir/$year -type f | xargs cat | /usr/local/bin/hypermail -x -d $output_dir/$year`;
}