Creating Mailman users who can create lists

[It's easier to create mailman lists through the command line.]

Creating a list at:
example.com/mailman/create

Gives the error:
You are not authorized to create new mailing lists

Which isn't a very nice thing to say.

(where does the user log in, what kind of user rights must have)

From a forum post asking the same question:

> I am running RH ES 3 and installed the mailman rpm. Every time I try to
> create a list it give me this error:
>
> Error: You are not authorized to create new mailing lists
>
> Can some one please give me a hand.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Tech

What user are you trying to do this as? Is it mailman? Permissions are
granted on a group basis with the group mailman as the group having
permission on the mailman files. When the rpm is installed the user
mailman is created and group mailman is created, both uid and gid should
be 41. By default the only member of the mailman group is the user
mailman. Unless you're executing as a member of the mailman group you're
going to have permission problems.

For security reasons, even though the user mailman is created by the rpm
installation the mailman user is not assigned a password and the mailman
login shell is set to "nologin" preventing logging on as the user
mailman. This done because the act of installing the mailman rpm should
not grant login privileges just because the package was installed (many
admins and users install all packages without ever intending to run
them, it would be a security hole for installation to open up accounts).

The root user will need to assign mailman a password and unlock the
mailman account by changing the login shell to something other than
"nologin". At that point the proper course of actions is to "su" to
mailman or login as mailman which will put you in the mailman directory
where you will find the bin subdirectory with the command line
utilities.
--
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>