The Professional Edition of MailMan needs one last thing before you can use it. Since the Professional Edition writes out files as a part of its job, you need to configure a location on your file system for it to store information. You have to create a directory, configure that directory so that MailMan is allowed to write files to it, and then tell MailMan where that directory is. If you are using the Standard Edition of MailMan then you don't need to create this directory because the Standard Edition never needs to write out files to your server.

In most cases we recommend the "/var" system directory as the best place to keep your user information. The directory "/var/mailman" is a good choice because it's a directory that will be pretty obvious in the future if some future system administrator has to figure out what you have done. If your web site is on a hosted server then you might not have access to the system's "/var" directory so you might have to create your own directory in your personal home directory. You could use something like "~you/mailman" if you were a fan of obvious names like we are. If you just can't figure out where to put your user information then contact us, we're happy to make suggestions based on your individual situation.

It's easy to set up a directory for MailMan. Just follow these easy steps:

1) Create your chosen directory with "mkdir /var/mailman", or whatever location you have picked.

2) Then set the permissions to be very restrictive, "chmod 700 /var/mailman". That configures the directory so that it's only usable by the user that owns the directory.

3) Then make sure that the directory is owned by whatever user your web server runs as, since in most cases the web server does not run as your username. For example, if your web server runs as the user "httpd", then you would type "chown httpd /var/mailman".

The result should be a directory that is owned by the web server user, with permissions set to "700", meaning that only that user can read, write, or use the directory. Then set the users location in the MailMan script to "/var/mailman/". After that MailMan should be able to write out the files that it needs. I am going to be adding both of these issues to our documentation on Tuesday. I'm sorry that they weren't already there for you, but the documentation has been changing a lot recently. If you have any other questions or problems, I'll be more than happy to help.