Requirements

Software requirements

Operating system

Sympa supports POSIX-based Unix-like operating systems. At least following operating systems have been reported working:

Several GNU/Linux distributions: Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint, RHEL / CentOS / Fedora, Slackware, SLES / openSUSE, etc.
FreeBSD (2.x or later), NetBSD, OpenBSD.
macOS.
Tru64 UNIX.
Solaris (2.5 or later).
AIX (V4 or later).
HP-UX (10.20).

Sympa does not support Microsoft Windows.

Perl interpreter

Perl 5 interpreter is required. Currently, Perl 5.16.0 and later are supported, however, recent version of Perl 5 is recommended.

Note

As of Sympa 6.2.61b, support for Perl 5.14.x or earlier has been dropped.

As of Sympa 6.2.45b, support for Perl 5.10.0 or earlier has been dropped.

RDBMS

SQL server should have been installed and can be managed. At least following systems are supported:

MySQL (4.1.1 or later) or MariaDB.
PostgreSQL (7.4 or later).
Oracle Database (9i or later is recommended).
SQLite (3.x).

Though Sympa can share database server with the other systems, dedicated database server is strongly recommended.

SQLite does not need actual server: It directly accesses database file on local storage. Using it on the sites with low volume is worth consideration.

Mail transfer agent (MTA)

Mail server is required. At least following products are reported working with Sympa:

Sendmail (V8).
Postfix (2.x or 3.x).
exim.
OpenSMTPD.
qmail. Use of this is discouraged because it lacks modern features.

HTTP server

To provide web interface, HTTP server is required. At least following products are reported working with Sympa:

Other software components

Sympa depends on several software components including tens of external Perl modules. Mandatory modules will be installed during installation process. More modules required to enable optional features will be described in each section of this document.

Network requirements

Inbound and outbound SMTP connections (typically on TCP port 25) should be allowed.
For web interface, inbound HTTP or HTTPS connections (typically on TCP port 80 or 443) should be allowed.
Any other unnecessary inbound accesses including database connections should be inhibited by taking measures such as firewall.
Finally, at least one mail domain name for the mailing list service is indispensable. Appropriate DNS resource record (MX, A, AAAA or any of them) for that domain must be advertised.