Mailman Not Sending Welcome Message

I'm using Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager for a new mailing list. After creating a new mailing list through the web interface for mailman, I created aliases in /etc/aliases, which are shown below, for the list and ran the command newaliases.

## book_nook mailing list
book_nook:              "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman post book_nook"
book_nook-admin:        "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman admin book_nook"
book_nook-bounces:      "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman bounces book_nook"
book_nook-confirm:      "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman confirm book_nook"
book_nook-join:         "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman join book_nook"
book_nook-leave:        "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman leave book_nook"
book_nook-owner:        "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman owner book_nook"
book_nook-request:      "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman request book_nook"
book_nook-subscribe:    "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe book_nook"
book_nook-unsubscribe:  "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe book_nook"

I then added an email address to the list with the option to send a welcome message checked. But the welcome message was never sent. After doing a little checking, I discovered I needed to create a crontab entry for mailman ¹ .

On my RedHat Linux system, the file to be submitted for the cronjob is /var/mailman/cron/crontab.in, but may be in /usr/local/mailman/cron on other systems ²

At the end of the crontab.in file, I saw the following lines:

# At 3:27am every night, regenerate the gzip'd archive file.  Only
# turn this on if the internal archiver is used and
# GZIP_ARCHIVE_TXT_FILES is false in mm_cfg.py
27 3 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip

There was no GZIP_ARCHIVE_TXT_FILES entry in /var/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py, so I commented out the entry in crontab.in. Since I don't need to gate news from a news server to mail, I also commented out the entry for that function by putting a "#" in front of it.

# Every 5 mins, try to gate news to mail.  You can comment this one out
# if you don't want to allow gating, or don't have any going on right now,
# or want to exclusively use a callback strategy instead of polling.
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/mailman/cron/gate_news

I then submitted the cronjob for mailman with crontab -u mailman /var/mailman/cron/crontab.in.

References:

1. [Mailman-Users] Not sending password reminders, subscription confirmations
   By Helmut Schneider
   July 13, 2006
   mail.python.org Mailing Lists
2. Mailman - a mailing list manager
   The FreeBSD Diary

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