Majordomo is a mailing list manager (MLM) developed by Brent Chapman. It is written in

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

and works in conjunction with

sendmail Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet. A descendant of t ...

UNIX Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

and related operating systems. The name is derived from

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

majordomo A majordomo () is a person who speaks, makes arrangements, or takes charge for another. Typically, this is the highest (''major'') person of a household (''domūs'' or ''domicile'') staff, a head servant who acts on behalf of the owner of a larg ...

" meaning "master of the house"; in English, the word refers to a large household's chief servant. The current version of Majordomo is 1.94.5, released 19 January 2000. The official Web site warns that it will not work with Perl versions 5.001 and 5.005_01 specifically. It recommends using Perl 4.036 or the latest version available. Support for Perl 4.036 may not be kept for the future.

History

With the advent of email, many

mailing list A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. Mailing lists are often rented or sold. If rented, the renter agrees to use the mailing list only at contra ...

s were maintained manually, with a list owner adding and removing participants by editing a text file. In 1984,

LISTSERV The term Listserv (styled by the registered trademark licensee, L-Soft International, Inc., as LISTSERV) has been used to refer to electronic mailing list software applications in general, but is more properly applied to a few early instances of ...

was developed to run on

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

VM mainframes, and automated mailing lists on a large scale. Most mailing lists moved to commercial mailing list hosting services, often with a stipend of $100 or more paid to the list owner by the hosting service in exchange for the transfer. Most of those hosting providers were subsequently bought out by

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

and merged into its now-discontinued

Yahoo! Groups Yahoo! Groups was a free-to-use system of Electronic mailing list, electronic mailing lists offered by Yahoo!. Prior to February 2020, Yahoo! Groups was one of the world's largest collections of online discussion boards. It allowed members to s ...

service. Majordomo has been in widespread use since 1992, predating the popularity of the

Web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

, in an era when many people had access to email, but the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

did not enjoy wide deployment. As a result, tasks such as subscribing and unsubscribing are only handled by sending mail messages. There are front-ends, such as MajorCool, to provide a Web interface. Many mailing lists still use Majordomo.

Majordomo 2

, a complete rewrite of Majordomo was underway, with a focus on keeping the familiar email interface while greatly improving the Web interface and other features. This coding effort is referred to as Majordomo 2 and is being used by the

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused operating system, security-focused, free software, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by fork (software development), forking NetBSD ...

project.

Licensing

Majordomo is community-supported source available software; the license states "No part of Majordomo may be incorporated into any program or other product that is sold, or for which any revenue is received without written permission of Great Circle Associates". There are a few exceptions listed in the license to this: "You may install Majordomo at your site and run mailing lists for other (sic) using it, and charge for that service. You may install Majordomo at other sites, and charge for your time to install, configure, customize, and manage it. You may charge for enhancements you've made to the Majordomo software, subject to the distribution restrictions listed n the license You may not charge for the Majordomo software itself".

References

External links

* {{official website, http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/
Majordomo FAQ

Majordomo 2
Perl software Mailing list software 1992 software Mailing list software for Linux

History

Majordomo 2

Licensing

See also

References

External links