This subsection answers questions regarding hardware, software, and network requirements for running MailMan.

In order to install either edition of MailMan you must have a functioning web server that has the ability to run Perl CGI applications. We strongly recommend Apache Server simply because we are very familiar with it and it is known to work very well pretty much everywhere. MailMan has been installed on virtually every web server that we have ever heard of, including Microsoft IIS on Windows servers and Apache on Macintosh OSX servers. Your server must have Perl, version 5 installed. For Windows servers we strongly recommend using the ActivePerl interpreter, available from ActiveState.

We have tested MailMan on systems running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows XP, just about every variant of BSD including Macintosh OSX, plus Linux, Solaris, Irix, and lots of others. MailMan has no known operating system incompatibilities. If you are curious about whether your operating system can support MailMan, it probably can. If you are not sure whether your web server can support MailMan, it probably can. If you are not sure whether your mail server is compatible with MailMan, it probably is.

To run the Professional Edition of MailMan, you must also have some disk space free on your HTTP server for storing user messages and settings. How much disk space you need depends on how many users you have and how much mail they get.

To read incoming mail you must have access to a functioning POP3 mail server and to send outgoing messages you must have access to a functioning STMP mail server. These are all very common Internet standards and you probably have access to the necessary mail servers if you have an Internet email account.

Do I need the file "cgi-lib.pl" to run MailMan?

In older installations of MailMan, the file "cgi-lib.pl" was included in the installation, and was critical to MailMan. Current versions of MailMan now incorporate necessary functionality from "cgi-lib.pl" directly into the script so that you don't have to worry about it.