Requirements

Mailman currently runs only on GNU/Linux and any other POSIX-compliant operating system, such as BSD-based, Solaris, MacOS X, etc. It probably does not work on Windows, and while you might be able to get it running on a Cygwin system, it is not recommended or supported.

You must have the Python interpreter installed somewhere on your system. For Mailman 2.1, Python 2.7 is recommended. For Mailman 3, you will need Python 3.4 or newer to run the core, and Python 2.7 to run the web user interface and archiver.

You must have a mail server (MTA) that you can send messages to, and for Mailman 3, supports delivery to a local agent over LMTP. You will need a web server that supports the CGI/1.1 API for Mailman 2.1, and WSGI for Mailman 3. Apache makes a fine choice for web server, and MTAs such as Postfix, Exim, Sendmail, and qmail should work just fine.

For Mailman 2.1, you will also need an ANSI C compiler to build Mailman's security wrappers. All modern versions of the GNU C compiler should work well. This is not required for Mailman 3.