Sympa Mailing List Server

Introduction
This article will guide you through the process of setting up a basic mailing list server using Sympa, as well as the embended mailing list management/archive website.

This article does not cover setting up a mail server, see Mail server using Postfix and Dovecot for that, or other articles in Category:Mail Servers. This article does not cover details about installation of an overlay, see the official documentation, the manual pages for make.conf and portage, or the wiki article.

Versions Used
This article was written for Sympa 5.4.3. If you are using higher versions than these, please consult the software documentation for a list of changes.

Prerequisities
This article assumes that you already have a compatible RDBMS installed and set up for database hosting. MySQL will be used in this example, but others are supported by Sympa: PostgreSQL, SQLite and SQLite3.

An HTTP server ready for fastcgi and static contents hosting, although it *is* optionnal. Lighttpd will be used as an example, Apache2 configuration example is provided in the documentation as well.

Hostnames (example.org)
This article uses the standard example.org hostname. When you see this hostname, you should replace it with the hostname of the mailing list server.

Users
The following users are used by this setup: (Note that user id numbers may vary)
 * root (0) - Most services are started as root (this is a requirement for services that use a port < 1024)
 * sympa (104) - Used for fastcgi process and daemons.

The following groups are used by this setup:
 * sympa (1002) - Used for fastcgi process and daemons.

All of these users should either already exist or be created for you when you install the software.

Overlay
First, we need to add the overlay because all packages aren't part of the official portage overlay. There are two ways to do this:

0) Download it from the portage ebuild proposal, patch it with instructions on comments, and install it, and apply post-install fixes in comments. 1) Use the slonko overlay proposed by Marcin Deranek.

Emerging
Then, we need to make sure that the software is installed with the correct options. To do this, add the following lines to (create it if it doesn't exist) to set the USE flags to get the required features:

"fastcgi" and "ssl" use flags are for the optionnal website, as written in Prerequisities.

Add the following line to (create it if it doesn't exist) to unmask the relevent software versions:

Install all of the software packages with:

Configuring the database
Sympa needs a database, and a user with all privileges on the database.

In this example, we use "ranpwd" to generate a password, it is avalaible in stable portage.

MySQL
It will prompt for your mysql root password once.

Configuring Sympa
configure Sympa and have a look at the website configuration that should be OK by default. . Each configuration variable is commented properly and it seems like none deserve a special note in this article!

Then, start Sympa. It starts all the sympa subsystems. You may want to add it to the default runlevel

Configuring the HTTP Server
If FEATURES="-nodoc", then some examples for Lighttpd and Apache2 are installed in /usr/share/doc/sympa-5.4.3/.

Lighttpd
First, make sure that "mod_alias" is loaded by Lighttpd in. Then, copy the sample config:, and include it in , with.