This section describes the inner working of MailMan for installation administrators that want to customize their installations.

Branding your MailMan installation

All of MailMan's output is defined by a collection of HTML templates. The templates are the ".htm" files that begin with "t_" in your distribution. We have provided a sample look and feel for MailMan that is based on our web site that you are welcome to use for as long as you like. If you would prefer to exercise greater control over the appearance of your installation though, you can easily customize your templates.

When you begin the customization process, simply open the templates in any HTML editor and make your modifications. Remember that the behavior of MailMan is dictated by hidden fields contained within the HTML templates, so make sure that you go slowly and check your results often, as it may be possible to 'break' your installation by accidentally deleting or modifying important keywords. We hope to provide more detailed information on what MailMan's keywords are and what they mean in this document at a later date. Since most changes that most people make to the MailMan configuration are color and logo-oriented, we have centralized all of MailMan's color specifications into a single CSS file that you can modify without even modifying a single template file.

Rigging POP3 and SMTP server names

Another common modification is rigging the names of the POP3 and SMTP servers so that your users don't have to provide anything other than a username and password. The POP3 server that Mailman uses is specified in the HTML templates by the parameter "SERVER". The only place where MailMan normally accepts this value from the default templates is in the template "t_login.htm". One simple and quick way to rig the name of the server is to provide a default value by altering the form field element. To do this, open "t_login.htm" in an HTML editor or text editor and locate the form field:

<input type="text" name="SERVER" size="30">

...and replace it with:

<input type="text" name="SERVER" size="30" value="popserver.mydomain.com">

The box will now be filled in by default for the user when they log on, but your users will still have the option of overriding the selection if they like. If you have a group of different mail servers, then you can use this technique to replace the "input" tag with a "select" tag for providing a drop-down list of mail servers. If you need to do that and you don't understand what we mean, then just contact us for assistance, we're happy to help.

The SMTP server used by MailMan is specified by the parameter "OUTGOING" in the template "t_messageform.htm". Change the form fields that set the "OUTGOING" keyword in "t_messageform.htm" in order to rig the outgoing SMTP server to something specific. Keep in mind that any alterations to the templates don't prevent people from "spoofing" your installation and manually ordering it to connect to any server that they like. If you are concerned about long-term security then you should use the method below to hard-code your server names into the script itself.

Hard-coding the server names into the script

If you want to make sure that your MailMan installation can only access the specific servers that you want, then you can hard-code the names of the POP3 and SMTP server into the script itself. To do this, find the locations of the servers in your "t_login.htm" and "t_messageform.htm" templates as described above, and remove the entire "<input>" field from your templates entirely. We have constructed the templates so that you can pretty easily remove the entire form row in both cases, just remove everything from the "<tr>" before the "input" element to the "</tr>" after it, including the "<tr>" and "</tr>" tags themselves. Finally, set the configuration variables "$strIncomingServer" and "$strOutgoingServer" in the MailMan script itself, as illustrated in the comments. Those variables are set toward the top of the script. If you set these values, then even if a hacker attempts to spoof a login page to redirect MailMan to a different server, it will always use the servers that you specify.

Rigging a MailMan installation to use a particular interface

To rig MailMan to always use the frames or no-frames mode, just remove the entire rows in your "t_login.htm" template that pertain to selecting the interface and then add a hidden form tag that specifies which interface you want to use. It should look like:

<input type="hidden" name="NOFRAMES" value="TRUE">

...or you can specify "FRAMES" if you like that interface and you want your users to be forced to use it.

Email addresses for "From" lines in outbound mail

When MailMan produces the message composition form for sending new messages, it needs to fill in a value for the user's "From" line. MailMan will automatically guess an email address based on the user's POP3 username and the server name. In some cases this address is either a lot more specific than necessary (i.e., "support@mail.it.yourcompany.com" instead of "support@yourcompany.com") or completely wrong (i.e., "your-support@shell1.ba.best.com" instead of "support@yourcompany.com"). There are lots of options for configuring the way that MailMan infers outbound "From" email addresses. For information on all of those options, please look at the settings listed in your "mailman.cgi" script file in the section labeled "Email Address Settings". The configuration options are "From Domain Trim", "From Domain Name", "Username is the Email Address", "Email Address Mapping File", and "Outgoing Domain Name". We have tried to organize these options in the order in which they are most-commonly needed by our users. The documentation in the script on these settings is extensive, but if you have any questions about any of the settings then please just contact us and we will be happy to help.

Moving image files

It is not possible for MailMan to include a "MailMan()" keyword in the templates so that the image URLs can be automatically rewritten. This is because the keyword would make the image URLs invalid in the raw HTML template files, which would make customizing the templates with an HTML editor very difficult. Originally there was no way to correct your image URLs other than by actually editing the templates, but this is an inconvenient solution. To rectify this situation and make things easier for site maintainers, we have included the "$strURLImageLocation" configuration variable. This variable contains a string that will be prepended to the image URLs when the template is processed at runtime. To use this variable, set it to the exact value that you want prepended to image names in order to make them into URLs that will point to your image directory. For instance, if you bury your images in an "images" directory under the directory where MailMan is installed, set this to "images/" (with the slash). If you put your images in a completely different directory, something that is rooted, like "/mailman/images/" might be what you are looking for. In the most extreme cases you can do away with relative URLs entirely and provide a complete absolute URL like the one below:

strURLImageLocation = 'http://www.endymion.com/images/';

Altering the message composition box

We've done our best to make sure Mailman is cosmetically pleasing on as many different kinds of browsers as possible; however, there have been some reports of the "message input" field being too large or too small, thus making it quite cumbersome to write an email. The choice is ultimately up to you.

To alter the size of the message composition box, use the ".formText" CSS item in your "style.css" file. Don't forget that Netscape version 4 is broken with this as it is broken in regard to many things, so you will also have to manually alter a "font" tag that surrounds the "textarea" form input box on the message composition page if you want your changes to also affect Netscape 4. Later, saner versions of Netscape that are based on Mozilla's Gecko engine do not have this problem.

Another option is to change the value in the "cols=" expression from 80 to a smaller number. This will make the box thinner.

Logging users directly in

If you are generating a dynamic web page with user information, then you can create a link that will log the user straight in to MailMan. Simply create a link to your MailMan installation that includes parameters for the information provided by the login form. For example, to log in to a MailMan installation at http://mail.mycompany.com/mailman/mailman.cgi, your link would look like this:

http://mail.mycompany.com/mailman/mailman.cgi?LOGIN=1&USERNAME=U1&PASSWORD=P1&SERVER=S1

Replace the "U1" with your user's POP3 user name, replace "P1" with your user's POP3 password, and replace "S1" with the name of the mail server. When your user follows this link, MailMan will interpret the parameters as if the user had submitted the login form. You can include other parameters from the form as well, such as specifying frames or no-frames mode.