vanilla-mailman | directional gateway between Vanilla web forum | Collaboration library

Integrating a web-based discussion forum with an email list is a non-trivial task with many corner cases. Therefore this software has some strong opinions on how this integration should be accomplished. First, the versions of Mailman as well as Vanilla are highly specific. Mailman must be of the 2.1+ variety, with the modifications described herein; the new 3.0 branch is currently guaranteed not to work with this implementation, because this implementation accesses MySQL databases in which both Mailman and Vanilla store their details directly. This system was designed to run on a single CentOS 6.4 installation with command-line and root access. Later versions of CentOS 6.x might work, but the installation steps may vary from the steps described in this document. In this installation, the Vanilla Forum, as well as the mailman server, are intended to run on the same physical machine; however there is no techical reason why this must be the case, as long as the shared MySQL database is accessible to both the server running Vanilla as well as the server running Mailman. However, a dual-server installation has not been tested.
There are several major steps that must be completed in the following order to get this software to work correctly.
Install CentOS prerequisites gcc wget mysql-devel httpd OPTIONAL: epel OPTIONAL: phpMyAdmin perl CPAN cpanm
Uninstall sendmail
Install and test postfix
Download and compile mailman
Install mailman
Test mailman
OPTIONAL: Set up SPF
OPTIONAL: Set up DKIM
Install vanilla forum
Install necessary vanilla plugins Force Guest Sign-In Useful Functions Mailman
Install Emails-Parser
Set up gateway user (vanillagate) Install cron jobs for vanillagate
OPTIONAL: install xdebug
This installation was conducted on CentOS 6.4 Final, with:. run on it as of August 23 2013.
This step is recommended but not strictly necessary. If you don't do this though you'll need to have another preferred method for viewing and administrating the MySQL database you just installed. Generic instructions on how to set up EPEL are here. Once you've done this, you can type.
Since you've already installed php-pecl-memcached, you can let your Vanilla installation use it and speed up its performance considerably.
This software reads and parses e-mail using the Maildir directory format. One mail client that reads and writes this format, and hence is useful for debugging, is the mutt mail reader.
IMPORTANT! Do NOT use yum to install mailman. It's necessary to change a lot of the default settings from the way that the CentOS distribution does this by default. So download the latest Mailman 2.1 sources from the GNU distribution:.
Copy mm_cfg.py from the mailman-2.1 changes directory to /usr/local/mailman/Mailman on the remote server. This file will need to be edited to set the fully qualified domain name of the server and email hosts:.
In /etc/postfix/main.cf, tweak the alias_maps line:.
At this point, you'll have to do the remaining manual steps for installing Mailman, including installing the crontab as well as installing and starting the default service. Also, you'll need to create site and list passwords. Make sure that you can log in and administrate your mailing list via the Mailman web interface at the http://your.site.com/mailman address. Also, now would be a good time to verify that mail coming into and out of your mailing list works normally as well.
At this point, you'll need to teach Mailman about any mailing lists that you want Mailman to manage. Create your mailing lists in the usual fashion using the Mailman web interface. See http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-install/node45.html for more details. Also verify that your mailing lists operate nominally as mailing lists before proceeding.
While it is not strictly necessary to set up anti-spam features for your mailing list, the vast majority of modern mail services will immediately mark your mail as spam unless you install some modern services on your postfix mail server. These include at least SPF, DKIM and possibly DMARC.
While setting up an SPF record for your domain is beyond the scope of this document, some general advice is in order. If you are running your own mail server, as this document assumes, then you will need to add a TXT record with the (short) host name of your mail server, and a TXT record with a value like. For more information on how to design an SPF record, see http://www.openspf.org/Tools and/or http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/ and/or http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html.
As root, install the OpenDKIM package:.
Many modern e-mail services will reject your e-mail just for not having reverse DNS set up appropriately. Make sure that reverse DNS is working correctly for your domain. Once you have done all this, e-mail sent from your postfix mail server to a mail testing service, such as that at http://www.mail-tester.com/, should indicate that your e-mail is spam-free.
Install the 2.2.3.5 version of Vanilla into the /var/www/html directory on the server. Later or other versions may or may not work with the Vanilla plugin for Mailman. You'll need to set up a Vanilla-specific user on MySQL in order to do this; I found phpMyAdmin very helpful, but it's also possible via the command line as well.
This step may be skipped if everything works the way you expect, but if for some reason the Mailman plugin misbehaves, installing xdebug on the web server can be used to help debug the plugin. If you've installed EPEL, you can at this point install xdebug in a straightforward manner:. Now xdebug.so lives in /usr/lib64/php/modules/xdebug.so .
The following plugins must be installed into Vanilla for this system to work:. To install these plugins, download them from http://www.vanillaforums.org and copy the directories into the /var/www/html/plugins directory on the server. Case is important -- make sure the directories are capitalized. Additionally, copy the Mailman folder onto the server, also into /var/www/html/plugins .
Copy the Mailman directory provided in this system to the Vanilla plugins directory at /var/www/html/plugins . Then log on to Vanilla as the Vanilla administrator and go to the Vanilla dashboard. Under the Addons tab, select Plugins. You should see an entry for the Mailman plugin. Enable this plugin. Then, click the Settings button for the Mailman plugin. The only setting that must be edited in this screen for the default install, is the List Email Address. This should be the e-mail address that a normal user would send e-mail to have it republished by mailman. Edit this field accordingly and click Save.
Download and install the latest tarball from http://search.cpan.org/~ether/local-lib/lib/local/lib.pm . These instructions were interpolated from http://search.cpan.org/~ether/local-lib/lib/local/lib.pm :.
Copy the Module/Emails-Parser directory to the vanillagate user's account. The perl module should exist at /home/vanillagate/Emails-Parser after completion.
First, make sure you're logged onto an account that can edit permissions of files in the Vanilla web directory. In order to run the Vanilla tick job, the tick program needs to be able to write to the directory plugins/UsefulFunctions/bin . Yes this is a silly and unnecessary security hole. Just do it and don't think about it too much.
Copy the vanillagate-job.bash file from the cron directory from this package into the root directory of the vanillagate user, at /home/vanillagate. You may review the contents of this file if you wish.