Working with MinorDomo Revision as of Monday, 21 December 2015 at 02:30 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
mind 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](http://www.hypermail-project.org/hypermail.html) |

|——|——|——————–|——–|——|————————————————–|———-|——|———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-|——–|——|————————————————————————————————————-|————-|——|———————————————-|———-|——|————————————————————————————————|———–|———–|——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————|

• 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 | subscribes to a mailing list |——– | unsubscribe | unsubscribes from a mailing list |——– | info [] | gets information on a list or server |——– | 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`;
}