Lofland bLOG

Mailman works by using the aliases file to have mail sent to certain addresses to a program (mailman) using the aliase file.

Probably, if you get it set up right, you’ll see this error in your maillog:

Jul  3 10:44:36 SERVER smrsh: uid 1: attempt to use “mailman post MAILADDRESS” (stat failed)
Jul  3 10:44:36 SERVER sendmail[5555]: NUMBERS: to=”|/folders/mailman/mail/mailman post MAILADDRESS”, ctladdr= (1/0), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=prog, pri=30539, dsn=5.0.0, stat=Service unavailable

Here is the text from mailman’s docs:

Problem: I use Sendmail as my mail server, and when I send mail to the list, I get back mail saying, “sh:
mailman not available for sendmail programs”.
Solution: Your system uses the Sendmail restricted shell (smrsh). You need to configure smrsh by creating a
symbolic link from the mail wrapper (‘$prefix/mail/mailman’) to the directory identifying executables allowed
to run under smrsh.
Some common names for this directory are ‘/var/admin/sm.bin’, ‘/usr/admin/sm.bin’ or ‘/etc/smrsh’.
Note that on Debian Linux, the system makes ‘/usr/lib/sm.bin’, which is wrong, you will need to create the
directory ‘/usr/admin/sm.bin’ and add the link there. Note further any aliases newaliases spits out will need to
be adjusted to point to the secure link to the wrapper.

and here is the fix:

ln -s /appl/wfa/mailman/mail/mailman /usr/adm/sm.bin/mailman