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Asked: 2026-05-21T23:56:45+00:00

I recently had to move servers. On the old server, I had a Mailman

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I recently had to move servers. On the old server, I had a Mailman listserv distribution list, but since Mailman was not supported on the new server, I wrote up a PHP script to read messages from IMAP and resend via SMTP. The script is brittle (my fault) and complex (not my fault): I’m having to parse each message, find the bits that I can use (if it’s multi-part or HTML or it has attachments), and then reconstruct the message for SMTP so that each member except the sender gets a copy and the Reply-To is the distribution list address. The thing is, I know that the raw source of the message is fine as is. I just need to change/add a few headers.

On Windows servers, you can configure an email dropbox folder where you could save outgoing mail messages in their raw form. Is there anything similar on *nix? Is there any other method I should look at?

I know I can set up a forwarder address on the server, but I really like the behavior of listserv systems: senders don’t get a copy of their own message, the subject is identified with the list’s label and hitting “Reply” sends a message back to the distribution list, not the original sender.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In order to create your own bespoke list server system you’ll need to do the following:

    1. Configure your mail server to have an alias such as no-reply@yourdomain.com to redirect messages to black-hole or /dev/null or something like that, basically deleting any messages on arrival without returning NDR (non-delivery report) email messages to senders. This is the address your script will use in the To: header of your email messages when sending to the group.

    2. Write your PHP script section that sends to the group in such a way that: (a) first pulls all your subscribers out of a database (or securely stored data file) into an array, (b) next remove the message author’s address from the array, (c) then finally loop through all the remaining subscribers in the array in batches of about 15 recipients and send the message with the mail() function using To: "Your List Name" <no-reply@yourdomain.com and the BCC: (blind carbon copy) field to prevent receipients seeing who else is on the list.

    If you’re wanting to try out some of the existing solutions for this why not take a look at
    Majordomo.

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