mailman blocks postfix administration: proposed fix

The installation of the rpm mailman-2.1.9 included in opensuse 11.0 leads to later problems with postfix administration. This note explains how to avoid those problems.

Distribution opensuse 11.0 contains package mailman-2.1.9 which provides an essential README: File
/usr/share/doc/packages/mailman/README.SuSE explains how to set
up mailman. Amongst the instructions is

  1. Add /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases to the alias_maps statement in /etc/postfix/main.cf:
alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases, ..., hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/aliases

and reload postfix.

If you do this, mailman will work, but any later mofification to the postfix configuration via /etc/sysconfig/postfix will be rejected because main.cf is seen as “corrupted”. This can be a thorough nuisance. A better way to specify alias_maps for mailman is to add


  # POSTFIX_ADD_*
  # You may add any existing postfix parameter here. Just execute the
  # postconf command to get a complete list. You then have to uppercase
  # the parameter and prepend POSTFIX_ADD_.
  POSTFIX_ADD_ALIAS_MAPS="hash:/etc/aliases, hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/aliases"

to /etc/sysconfig/postfix and then run commands

SuSEconfig --module postfix
postconf -n

to update main.cf and check that alias_maps is correct.

Roger