Managing a mailing list  - Information for Administrators and Moderators

The default settings for lists should be suitable in most cases. Unless you are confident about making changes to original settings, leave all default options ticked.

  • Further documentation is provided at http://www.list.org/docs.html
  • Please view the documentation before asking for assistance
  • Leave your list configuration as simple as possible for ease of maintenance

Common Settings for Mailing Lists

The following are recommendations for the most common areas a list Administrator will need to access. You must be logged in to the Administration area to make these changes.

Setting Owner and Moderator Addresses

'Owners' can perform all administrative and configuration actions on the list, including 'moderating' (approving or rejecting messages). The list may have more than one 'owner' address if several people need to be able to do this.

'Moderators' can only approve or reject messages. Note that some lists do not need moderation at all, because they are simply set up to allow anyone on the list to send, or simply to reject anyone but the owner/s from sending.

  1. Click "General Options"
  2. Enter addresses, one per line, into the "Owner" and "Moderator" fields as required.
  3. Click "Submit your changes".

Note that the owners and moderators aren't automatically able to send to the list. You will also need to subscribe the owner/moderator address to the list and make sure the 'mod' (moderated) box is not ticked. See below, 'Subscribe or Unsubscribe List Members'.

Setting Administrator Password
  1. Click "Passwords"
  2. Set the Admin and Moderator passwords.
  3. Click "Submit your changes".
Set Description
  1. Click "General Options"
  2. Enter something in the "description" section
  3. Click "Submit your changes"

Setting Who Can Send To The List?

The mailing list can be set up in two ways:

  • Newsletter or announcement list where only the owner and moderators can send to the list
  • Discussion list where anyone can send to the list

Newsletter or Announcement list

  1. Click "Privacy Options"
  2. Click "Sender Filters"
  3. Under the heading "Member Filters" set default_member_moderation to 'yes'. (If some members have already been subscribed you may also need to go to the "Member Management" section and set 'Set everyone's moderation bit, including those members not currently visible' to be "On".)
  4. Click "Member Management".
  5. In the list of subscribed users, make sure that the owners and moderators addresses do not have the box for 'mod' ticked. (If the box for 'mod' is ticked it means messages from that address will be 'moderated' and so will be either bounced or held for approval).
  6. Click "Edit the public HTML pages and text files".
  7. Click "Welcome email text file".
  8. Remove these lines: 
    To post to this list, send your email to:

  %(emailaddr)s
  9. Click "Submit changes".
  10. Click "Edit the public HTML pages and text files".
  11. Click "General list information page".
  12. Remove these lines: 
     To post a message to all the list members, send email to
          <A HREF="mailto:<MM-Posting-Addr>"><MM-Posting-Addr></A>.
  13. Click "Submit changes".

Discussion list

  1. Click "Privacy Options".
  2. Click "Sender Filters".
  3. Under the heading "Member Filters" set "default_member_moderation" to 'no'. (If some members have already been subscribed you may also need to go to the "Member Management" section and set "Set everyone's moderation bit, including those members not currently visible" to be "Off".)
  4. OR if you do want moderators to approve messages before they are distributed to the list tick 'Yes' for "default_member_moderation" and 'Hold' for "member_moderation_action".
  5. Click "Submit your changes".
Subscribing or Unsubscribing List Members

Subscribe

  1. Click "Membership Management".
  2. Click "Mass Subscription".
  3. Leave the options ticked.
  4. Add the addresses, one per line in the first box.
  5. Click "Submit Your Changes".
  6. View list members by clicking "Membership List". Check that the 'mod' box is correct for your needs. If it is not ticked this person can send to the list. If it is ticked, the user is 'moderated' meaning that messages from them to the list will not be delivered.

Unsubscribe

  • To remove list members one at a time go to "Membership List".

To remove a large amount of addresses, go to "Mass Removal" and follow the directions similar to adding members. (A tip for obtaining a plain text list of all addresses on the list, on per line, is to use the traditional Mailing List Commands)

Setting Up Archives

An archive is a copy of every message sent to the list, displayed as web pages. By default lists are created without archives to save space on the server. If you do require archives set them up as follows:

  1. Click "Archiving Options".
  2. For "Archive Messages" tick "Yes".
  3. For "Is archive file source for public or private archival?" tick "Public" if you want everyone to be able to see all the archives, or "Private" if only list members should be able to see the archives.
  4. Click "Submit your changes".
Nested Lists

If you subscribe a list to another list there are some additional configuration settings you need to set. The default settings are set as such for security reasons, so you must explicitly state you do not want them to apply for nested lists.

Do not subscribe lists within lists to any great depth. (Ie: do not subscribe list A to list B to list C to list D etc). In this case the mailing systems would need to through many 'hops' from address to address before reaching the final destination address. Most mailing systems will reject an address with too many 'hops'. Try to limit nesting to only one level, ie: one list or lists subscribed to another list (as opposed to a list subscribed to another list which is subscribe to another …).

For the list to which other list/s are subscribed:

  1. Go to "General Options".
  2. For the "umbrella_list" setting, tick "yes".
  3. Click "Submit your changes".

For any list which is subscribed to another list:

  1. Click "Privacy Options" then "Recipient Filters".
  2. For "require_explicit_destination" tick "No".
  3. Set "max_num_recipients" to 0.
  4. Click "Submit your changes".