GNU Mailman - List Administration Manual
Contents
1. by sending a message to this address a member can request unsubscription from the list As with the join address the Subject header and body of the message is ignored Note that mylist unsubscribe example com is an alias for the leave address e mylist owner example com This address reaches the list owner and list moderators directly e mylist request example com This address reaches a mail robot which processes email commands that can be used to set member subscription options as well as process other commands e mylist bounces example com This address receives bounces from members whose addresses have become either temporarily or permanently inactive The bounces address is also a mail robot that processes bounces and automatically disables or removes members as configured in the bounce processing settings Any bounce messages that are either unrecognized or do not seem to contain member addresses are forwarded to the list administrators e mylist confirm example com This address is another email robot which processes confirmation messages for subscription and unsubscription requests There s also an admin address which also reaches the list administrators but this address only exists for compatibility with older versions of Mailman 2 1 Introduction to GNU Mailman 1 2 Administrative Roles There are two primary administrative roles for each mailing list a list owner and a list moderator A list owne2. admin _notify_mchanges This variable controls whether the list administrators should get notifications when mem bers join or leave the list respond_to_post_requests This variable controls whether the original sender of a posting gets a notice when their message is held for moderator approval Additional settings This section contains some miscellaneous settings for your mailing list emergency When this option is enabled all list traffic is emergency moderated i e held for moderation Turn this option on when your list is experiencing a flamewar and you want a cooling off period new_member_options Each member has a set of subscription options which they can use to control how they receive messages and otherwise interact with the list While the members can change these settings by logging into their personal options page you might want to set the default for a number of the member options You can do that with this variable but see also the other categories for other member defaults you can set 2 1 The General Options Category 7 This variable presents a set of checkboxes which control the defaults for some of the member options Conceal the member s address specifies whether or not the address is displayed in the list roster Acknowledge the member s posting controls whether or not Mailman sends an acknowledgement to a member when they post a message to the list Do not send a copy of a member s own post specifies whether a me
3. A a RS oS 9 2 4 The Membership Management Category 2 2 0 0 eee ee 9 2 3 The Non digest Options Category eiii GAR eR ew a eee Rae ee ee Se 9 2 6 The Digest Ophons Category i ks pe eee BR PERS ERR e oe EOS So a wae a 11 2 The Privacy Options Category ogi os ee SOS ot BES GS SS Oe HESS SS RES S 12 Subscription les 6 ey beee ene te aeseeeradgean epesced day oh aeeedas amp 13 Sender ilies o es ag es ad Kee eG OEE SESH BS Ob S KEES EPS HES eH eeEES 14 Recipient Filters c cc cob RA Be Ea Be wep ee de ee eee eee 15 Spam Filters ge a a ae eee A ee a a be ee 15 2 9 The Bounce Processing Cates ory ois sae BS Soe en fk a a ee Be A a RS ES 16 29 The Archiving Options Category 2 2 iaaa eb 4a eee eee ee READ ew A 16 2 10 The Mail News Gateway Category 1 5 5 6 045 24644 R ek 2 Sew eRe eee bade eee eas 17 2 11 The Auto responder Category oscar Nas ee See ee Pee eee ee 4 17 212 The Content Filtenne Category eiea ae ee ek os BS Gb hs BES AO ow Ba S yg 17 2 13 The Topics Category es e r epee eed ewe Re ea a SH ERE PEE See OES 17 3 Membership Management 17 4 Tending to Pending Moderator Requests 17 5 Editing the Public HTML Pages 17 6 Deleting the Mailing List 17 A This is an Appendix 17 1 Introduction to GNU Mailman GNU Mailman is software that lets you manage electronic mailing lists It supports a wide range of mailing list types such as general discussion lists and announce only lists Mailman has extensive feature
4. SpamAssassin to add an X Spam Score header with between zero and 5 stars depending on the spam score Then you can add a line to this variable like X Spam Score 3 5 This line will match from 3 to 5 stars in the value of this field 2 7 The Privacy Options Category 15 2 8 The Bounce Processing Category These policies control the automatic bounce processing system in Mailman Here s an overview of how it works When a bounce is received Mailman tries to extract two pieces of information from the message the address of the member the message was intended for and the severity of the problem causing the bounce The severity can be either hard for fatal errors or soft for transient errors When in doubt a hard severity is used If no member address can be extracted from the bounce then the bounce message is usually discarded Every member has a bounce score initialized at zero and every time we encounter a bounce from a member we increment that member s score Hard bounces increment by 1 while soft bounces increment by 0 5 We only increment the bounce score once per day so even if we receive ten hard bounces from a member per day their score will increase by only 1 for that day When a member s bounce score is greater than the bounce score threshold see below the member s subscription is disabled Once disabled the member will not receive any postings from the list until their membership is explicitly re enabled ei
5. about this kind of identity leakage Reply To header munging This section controls what happens to the Reply To headers of messages posted through your list Beware Reply To munging is considered a religious issue and the policies you set here can ignite some of the most heated off topic flame wars on your mailing lists We ll try to stay as agnostic as possible but our biases may still peak through Reply To is a header that is commonly used to redirect replies to messages Exactly what happens when your users reply to such a message depends on the mail readers your users use and what functions they provide Usually there is both a reply to sender button and a reply to all button If people use these buttons correctly you will probably never need to munge Reply To so the default values should be fine Since an informed decision is always best here are links to two articles that discuss the opposing viewpoints in great detail e Reply To Munging Considered Harmful e Reply To Munging Considered Useful The three options in this section work together to provide enough flexibility to do whatever Reply To munging you might misguidingly feel you need to do first_strip_reply_to This variable controls whether any Reply To header already present in the posted message should get removed before any other munging occurs Stripping this header will be done regardless of whether or not Mailman will add its own Reply To hea
6. how your site is configured Note that real_name host_name description and info substitution variables take their values from the list configuration variables of the same name When personalization is enabled the following substitution variables are also available user_address The address of the recipient of the message coerced to lower case user_delivered_to The case preserved address that the user subscribed to the mailing list witht user_password The user s password in clear text user_name The user s full name user_optionsurl The url to the user s personal options page 2 6 The Digest Options Category Digest delivery is a way to bundle many articles together into one package which can be delivered once per day if there were any posted articles or whenever the package is bigger than a specified limit Some users may prefer this style of delivery for higher traffic lists since they will receive fewer messages Mailman supports two standard digest formats and if digests are enabled users can select which of the two formats they receive One is MIME digests where each message is an attachment inside a multipart digest This format also contains a summary table of contents and of course the an optional header and footer and it retains most of the headers of the original messages The second type is called plaintext digests because they are readable in mail readers that don t support MIME Actually they adhere
7. non members whose addresses match this list are rejected i e bounced back to the original sender There is currently no way to add additional text to the rejection message discard_these nonmembers Postings from non members whose addresses match this list are discarded with no bounce back message You might want to add the addresses of known spammers to this list generic nonmember action This variable controls what happens to non member posts when the address of the sender doesn t match any of the above four lists If you set this to Hold the posting will appear on the ad ministrative requests page and you will be given an opportunity to add the non member to one of the above four lists at the same time you dispose of the held message forward_auto_discards When messages from non members are discarded either because the sender address matched discard_these_nonmembers or because generic_nonmember_action is Discard you can choose whether such messages are forwarded to the list administrators or not Recipient Filters The variables in this section control various filters based on the recipient of the message require_explicit_destination This controls whether the mailing list posting address must be explicitly named in the To or Cc recipient lists The main reason why it wouldn t is if the message was blind carbon copied i e Bcc d to the list Spammers like to do this but sometimes legitimate messages are forwarded to the list thi
8. section This is an Appendix To create an appendix in a Python HOWTO document section This is another Just add another section but don t say appendix again 18 A This is an Appendix
9. the Subject Mailman is careful not to add a prefix when the header already has one as is the case in replies for example The prefix can also contain characters in the list s preferred language In this case because of the vagaries of the email standards you may or may not want to add a trailing space from is list This applies to all non digest messages sent by the list For settings that apply only to messages whose From domain publishes a DMARC p re ject or p quarant ine policy see the dmarc_moderation_ action description in section 2 7 If set to Munge From it replaces the From header address with the list s posting address to mitigate issues stemming from the original From domain s DMARC or similar policies and puts the original From address in a Reply To header If set to Wrap Message it wraps the original message as a MIME subpart of an outer message with From and Reply To headers as above 2 1 The General Options Category 5 anonymous _list This variable allows you to turn on some simple anonymizing features of Mailman When you set this option to Yes Mailman will remove or replace the From Sender and Reply To fields of any message posted to the list Note that this option is simply an aid for anonymization it doesn t guarantee it For example a poster s identity could be evident in their signature or in other mail headers or even in the style of the content of the message There s little Mailman can do
10. the administrative overview The only way then to find the list is to guess or know its name subscribe_policy This option controls the steps that a new member must take to join the list The available options may differ based on some defaults that the site administrator chooses They are e None No verification is done on the subscribing member This is also called open subscriptions and is generally disabled by default The site administrator must allow list admins to choose this option if not this option will not be presented to you e Confirm An email confirmation step is required before the address is added to the list When a member requests subscription either via the web page or by sending a message to yourlist jointexample com Mailman will send a confirmation message to the requesting address This mail back confirmation contains a unique identifier which the requester can present to Mailman in order to confirm their subscription This can be done either by replying to the mail back or by visiting the url in the mail back message The url points to a page that lets the user either discard or confirm their request e Require approval All subscription requests are held for approval of the list moderator No mail back confirmation is sent but the list admins will recieve a message indicating that approval is pending e Confirm and approve Here a mail back notice must first be confirmed by the requester Once confir
11. GNU Mailman List Administration Manual Release 2 1 Barry A Warsaw November 28 2015 Abstract This document describes the list administrator s interface for GNU Mailman 2 1 It contains information a list owner would need to configure their list either through the web interface or through email It also covers the moderator s interface for approving held messages and subscription notices and the web interface for creating new mailing lists In general it does not cover the command line interface to Mailman installing Mailman or interacting with Mailman from the point of view of the user That information is covered in other manuals Contents 1 Introduction to GNU Mailman 2 dy ALists Emal Addresses 22 35 Pra bees ee wee dee ed 2 1 2 Administrative Roles 405 544 5645455860 Seen neta pee a bea e pas ws 3 13 A lists Web Pages 2 s ad See id Ga amp bed a wi Pee eee Sede Bee oh 3 14 Basic Architectural Overview coo roces en a oe a ee 3 2 The List Configuration Pages 4 2 The General Options Category gis eo beds a ea e e A E MAE ES 4 General list personality s e ror esse e dea tea ENS e e a A E E SG 5 Reply To header MUNTIS ag rapie ed od OSS ED DES A OS L 6 Umbrella HStSetings eorne gee kd ee a he bee See a Sa ea ES J NOUMCAHONS lt a gr ir ri nnar e a A A 7 Additonal Settings soes ao eoig a A ol GL es RA E 7 2 2 The Passwords Category os es 2020 e a o e a e A 8 2 3 The Languages Options Category ds mi a a
12. aders that unambiguously identify the recipient of a message If that message bounces Mailman will know exactly which member it was intended for Note that because personalization requires extra system resources it must be enabled by the site administrator before you can choose it Here are the variables which control non digest delivery nondigestable This option controls whether members can receive immediate delivery or not If not they will be forced to receive messages in digests You can t disable non digest delivery if digests are already disabled personalize This option turns on message personalization msg header This text box lets you enter information that will be included in the header of every non digest message sent through the list See below for more information on what can go in the headers and footers If you leave this text box empty no header will be added msg footer Just like with the header you can add a footer to every message The same rules apply to footers as apply to headers Headers and footers can contain any text you want For non English lists the headers and footers can contain any character in the character set of the list s preferred language The headers and footers can also contain substitution variables which Mailman will fill in with information taken from the mailing list These substitutions are in Python string interpolation format where something like 1ist_name s is substituted with he nam
13. asis If the posted message has a X No Archive header regardless of value or a X Archive header with a value of No case insensitive then the message will not be archived although it will be treated as normal in all other ways archive private Controls whether Pipermail archives are private or public Private archives require a valid member address and password or a list administrator password in order to access them This option has no effect when a third party archiver is used archive_volume_frequency Controls how Pipermail splits messages in the archive The most common option is Monthly meaning a new archive volume is started every month Very high volume lists may want a shorter frequency e g Weekly or Daily where as lower volume lists may want a longer frequency e g Yearly This option has no effect when a third party archiver is used 2 10 The Mail News Gateway Category Mailman has a sophisticated mail to news gateway feature It can independently gate messages from news to mail and vice versa and can even be used to manage moderated newsgroups 2 11 The Auto responder Category 2 12 The Content Filtering Category 2 13 The Topics Category 3 Membership Management 4 Tending to Pending Moderator Requests 5 Editing the Public HTML Pages 6 Deleting the Mailing List A This is an Appendix To create an appendix in a Python HOWTO document use markup like this 2 10 The Mail News Gateway Category 17 appendix
14. at if you ve previously logged in as the list owner you do not need to re login to access the administrative requests page 1 4 Basic Architectural Overview This section will outline the basic architecture of GNU Mailman such as how messages are processed by the sytem Without going into lots of detail this information will help you understand how the configuration options control Mailman s functionality When mail enters the system from your mail server it is dropped into one of several Mailman queues depending on the address the message was sent to For example if your system has a mailing list named mylist and your domain is example com people can post messages to your list by sending them to mylist example com These messages will be dropped into the incoming queue which is also colloquially called the moderate and munge queue The incoming queue is where most of the approval process occurs and it s also where the message is prepared for sending out to the 1 2 Administrative Roles 3 list membership There are separate queues for the built in archiver the bounce processor the email command processor as well as the outgoing email and news queues There s also a queue for messages generated by the Mailman system Each of these queues typically has one queue runner or qrunner that processes messages in the queue The qrunners are idle when there are no messages to process Every message in the queues is represented
15. by two files a message file and a metadata file Both of these files share the same base name which is a combination of a unique hash and the Unix time that the message was received The metadata file has a suffix of db and the message file has a suffix of either msg if stored in plain text or pck if stored in a more efficient internal representation As a message moves through the incoming queue it performs various checks on the message such as whether it matches one of the moderation criteria or contains disallowed MIME types Once a message is approved for sending to the list membership the message is prepared for sending by deleting adding or changing message headers adding footers etc Messages in the incoming queue may also be stored for appending to digests 2 The List Configuration Pages After logging into the list configuration pages you ll see the configuration options for the list grouped in categories All the administrative pages have some common elements In the upper section you ll see two columns labeled Con figuration Categories Some categories have sub categories which are only visible when you click on the category link The first page you see after logging in will be the General Options category The specific option settings for each category are described below On the right side of the top section you ll see a column labeled Other Administrative Activities Here you ll find s
16. d version 5They ll also receive the message in the digest 2 6 The Digest Options Category 11 mime_is_default_digest If a member is allowed to choose digests this variable controls which is the default digest style they will receive Plain digests are RFC 1153 format as described above digest size threshold Normally digest members get at least one message per day if there have been any messages posted to the list However for high volume lists you may want to send out digests when the size has reached a certain threshold otherwise the one digest they receive could be huge This variable controls the size threshold by specifying the maximum digest size in kilobytes Note that this threshold isn t exact Set this variable to zero to specify that there is no size threshold in which case no more than one digest will be sent out per day but ensure that digest_send_periodic is Yes in this case or no digests will be sent digest send periodic This variable actually controls whether or not a digest is sent daily when the size threshold has not yet been met If set to No then digests will only be sent when they are bigger than digest_size_ threshold digest_header This text box lets you enter information that will be included in the header of every digest message sent through the list The same information can go in this header as can go in the msg_header except for the personalization variables digest footer Just like with the heade
17. der to the message Tf this option is set to No then any existing Reply To header will be retained in the posted message If Mailman adds its own header it will contain addresses which are the union of the original header and the Mailman added addresses The mail standards specify that a message may only have one Reply To header but that that header may contain multiple addresses reply_goes_to list This variable controls whether Mailman will add its own Reply To header and if so what the value of that header will be not counting original header stripping see above When you set this variable to Poster no additional Reply To header will be added by Mailman This setting is strongly recommended When you set this variable to This list a Reply To header pointing back to your list s posting address will be added When you set this variable to Explicit address the value of the variable reply_to_address see below will be added Note that this is one situation where Reply To munging may have a legitimate purpose Say you have two lists at your site an announce list and a discussion list The announce list might allow postings only from a small number of approved users the general list membership probably can t post to this list But you want to allow comments on announcements to be posted to the general discussion list by any list member In this case you can set the Reply To header for the announce list to point to the discussi
18. diately remove an address from the list once their bounce score exceeds the threshold This value must be an integer bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings interval The number of days between each disabled notification bounce_unrecognized goes to list owner This variable controls whether unrecognized bounces are discarded or forwarded on the list administrator The bounce detector isn t perfect although personalization can make it much more accurate The list owner may want to receive unrecognized bounces so that they can manually disable or remove such members bounce_notify_owner_on_disable This option controls whether or not the list owner is notified when a member s subscription is automatically disabled due to their bounce threshold being reached bounce_notify_owner_on_removal This option controls whether or not the list owner is notified when a member is removed from the list after their disabled notifications have been exhausted 2 9 The Archiving Options Category Mailman comes with a built in web based archiver called Pipermail although it can be configured to use external third party archivers 16 2 The List Configuration Pages archive This option tells Mailman whether to archive messages it receives or not regardless of whether Pipermail or a third party archiver is used Turn this off if you don t want to archive messages Note that senders can control whether their own posts are archived on an individual per message b
19. e ll describe the most common default configuration but check with your site administrator or hosting service for details Mailman provides a set of web pages that list members use to get information about the list or manage their member ship options There are also list archive pages for browsing an online web based archive of the list traffic These are described in more detail in the GNU Mailman user s manual Mailman also provides a set of pages for configuring an individual list as well as a set of pages for disposing of posting and subscription requests For a mailing list called mylist hosted at the domain lists example com you would typically access the administrative pages by going to http lists example com mailman admin mylist The first time you visit this page you will be presented with a login page asking for the list owner s password When you enter the password Mailman will store a session cookie in your browser so you don t have to re authenticate for every action you want to take This cookie is stored only until you exit your browser To access the administrative requests page you d visithttp lists example com mailman admindb mylist note the admindb url as opposed to the admin url Again the first time you visit this page you ll be presented with a login page on which you can enter either the list moderator password or the list owner password Again a session cookie is dropped in your browser Note also th
20. e of the mailing list Note that the trailing s is required For example a footer containing the following text This is the list_name s mailing list Description description s might get attached to postings like so This is the Example mailing list Description An example of Mailman mailing lists Here is the list of substitution variables available for your headers and footers real_name This is the value of the real_name configuration variable in the General options category list name This is the canonical name of the mailing list In other words it s the posting address of the list host_name This is the domain name part of the email address for this list 2The site administrator can configure lists to use a simpler interpolation format where 1ist_name or 1ist_name would be substituted with the mailing list s name Ask your site administrator if they ve configured your list this way 3For backward compatibility the variable _internal_name is equivalent 10 2 The List Configuration Pages web_page_url This is the base url for contacting the list via the web It can be appended with listinfo list_ name s to yield the general list information page for the mailing list description The brief description of the mailing list info This is the full description of the mailing list cgiext This is the extension added to CGI scripts It might be the empty string cgi or something else depending on
21. ers you may want to set this option to Never to disable prefix encoding This can make the subject headers slightly more readable for users with mail readers that don t properly handle non ASCII encodings Note however that if your mailing list receives both encoded and unencoded subject headers you might want to choose As needed Using this setting Mailman will not encode ASCII prefixes when the rest of the header contains only ASCII characters but if the original header contains non ASCII characters it will encode the prefix This avoids an ambiguity in the standards which could cause some mail readers to display extra or missing spaces between the prefix and the original header 2 4 The Membership Management Category The Membership Management category is unlike the other administrative categories It doesn t contain configuration variables or list settings Instead it presents a number of pages that allow you to manage the membership of your list This includes pages for subscribing and unsubscribing members and for searching for members and for changing various member specific settings More details on membership management are described in the Membership Management section 2 5 The Non digest Options Category Mailman delivers messages to users via two modes List members can elect to receive postings in bundles called digests one or a few times a day or they can receive messages immediately whenever the message is posted to the l
22. he message is From such a domain and this action is other than Accept this action applies to the message Otherwise the from_is_list setting in section 2 1 applies See the from_ is_list setting in section 2 1 for a description of the Munge From and Wrap Message actions dmarc_quarantine_moderation_action If this is set to Yes the above dmarc_moderation_action applies to messages with From domain DMARC policy p quarantine as well as p reject dmarc_moderation_ notice When dmarc_moderation_action applies and is Reject this variable contains the text sent in the rejection notice If empty a generic notice mentioning DMARC is sent The next batch of variables controls what happens when non members post messages to the list Each of these accepts one email address per line regular expressions are allowed if the line starts with the caret character These address lists are always consulted in the order in which they re presented on this page i e accepts first followed by holds rejections and discards accept_these_ nonmembers Postings from non members whose addresses match this list are accepted barring other list restrictions due to size implicit recipients etc You might want to add alternative addresses of approved posters to this list 14 2 The List Configuration Pages hold_these_nonmembers Postings from non members whose addresses match this list are held for moderator ap proval reject_these nonmembers Postings from
23. his category you can specify the password for these roles The list owner has total control over the configuration of their mailing list within some bounds as specified by the site administrator Note that on this page for historical reasons the list owner role is described here as the list administrator You can set the list owner s password by entering it in the password field on the left You must type it twice for confirmation Note that if you forget this password the only way for you to get back into your list s administrative pages is to ask the site administrator to reset it for you there s no password reminders for list owners If you want to delegate list moderation to someone else you can enter a different moderator password in the field on the right typed twice for confirmation Note that if you aren t going to delegate moderation and the same people are going to both configure the list and moderate postings to the list don t enter anything into the moderator password fields If you do enter a separate moderator password be sure to fill in the moderator variable in the General options category page 8 2 The List Configuration Pages 2 3 The Language Options Category Mailman is multilingual and internationalized meaning you can set up your list so that members can interact with it in any of a number of natural languages Of course Mailman won t translate list postings However if your site administrator has e
24. ignored and an error message will be displayed at the top of the resulting page The results page will always be the category page that you submitted 2 1 The General Options Category The General Options category is where you can set a variety of variables that affect basic behavior and public infor mation In the descriptions that follow the variable name is given first along with an overview and a description of what that variable controls Specifically a Python pickle 4 2 The List Configuration Pages General list personality These variables grouped under the general list personality section control some public information about the mailing list real name Every mailing list has both a posting name and a real name The posting name shows up in urls and in email addresses e g the mylist inmylist example com The posting name is always presented in lower case with alphanumeric characters and no spaces The list s real name is used in some public information and email responses such as in the general list overview The real name can differ from the posting name by case only For example if the posting name is my1i st the real name can be MyList owner This variable contains a list of email addresses one address per line of the list owners These addresses are used whenever the list owners need to be contacted either by the system or by end users Often these addresses are used in combination with the moderator addresse
25. ist This latter delivery mode is also called non digest delivery There are two administrative categories available for separately controlling digest and non digest delivery You can even disable one or the other forms of delivery but not both Both kinds of delivery can have list specific headers and footers added to them which can contain other useful infor mation you want your list members to see For example you can include instructions for unsubscribing or a url to the lists digest or any other information Non digest deliveries can also be personalized which means certain parts of the message can contain information tailored to the member receiving the message For example the To header will contain the address of the member 2 3 The Language Options Category 9 when deliveries are personalized Footers and headers can contain personalized information as well such as a link to the individual user s options page In addition personalized messages will contain extra information that Mailman can use to unambiguously track bounces from members Ordinarily Mailman does some pattern recognition on bounce messages to determine list members whose addresses are no longer valid but because of the vagaries of mail systems and the countless forwards people can put in place it s often the case that bounce messages don t contain any useful information in them Per sonalized messages avoid this problem by encoding information in certain he
26. ix it include_rfc2369_headers RFC 2369 is an internet standard that describes a bunch of headers that mailing list man agers should add to messages to make it easier for people to interact with the list Mail reading programs which support this standard may provide buttons for easy access to the list s archives or for subscribing and unsubscribing to the list It s generally a good idea to enable these headers as it provides for an improved user experience These headers are often called the List headers However not all mail readers are standards compliant yet and if you have a large number of members who are using non compliant mail readers they may be annoyed at these headers You should first try to educate your members as to why these headers exist and how to hide them in their mail clients As a last resort you can disable these headers but this is not recommended include_list_post header The List Post header is one of the headers recommended by RFC 2369 However for some announce only mailing lists only a very select group of people are allowed to post to the list the general mem bership is usually not allowed to post to such lists For lists of this nature the List Post header is misleading Select No to disable the inclusion of this header This does not affect the inclusion of the other List x headers 2 2 The Passwords Category As mentioned above there are two primary administrative roles for mailing lists In t
27. mber posting to the list will get a copy of their own posting Filter out duplicate messages to list members if possible specifies whether members who are explicitly listed as a recipient of a message e g via the Cc header will also get a copy from Mailman Of course members can always override these defaults by making changes on their membership options page administrivia This option specifies whether Mailman will search posted messages for admimistrivia in other words email commands which usually should be posted to the request address for the list Setting this to Yes helps prevent such things as unsubscribe messages getting erroneously posted to the list If a message seems to contain administrivia it is held for moderator approval max_message_size This option specifies a maximum message size in kilobytes over which the message will be held for moderator approval host_ name This option specifies the host name part of email addresses used by this list For example this is the example com part of the posting address my list example com It s generally not a good idea to change this value since its default value is specified when the mailing list is created Changing this to an incorrect value could make it difficult to contact your mailing list Also note that the url used to visit the list s pages is not configurable through the web interface This is because if you messed it up you d have to have the site administrator f
28. med the list moderator must then approve the request This is the most secure method for users to subscribe since it both verifies the requesting address and forces the list moderators to approve the request unsubscribe_policy Specifies whether the list moderator s approval is required for unsubscription requests No is highly recommended since it is exceedingly impolite to not allow people to leave a mailing list whenever they want i e opt out Yes is useful in some specialized contexts e g you may not want to allow employees to unsubscribe from the company newsletter ban_list This contains a list of addresses or regular expressions one per line that are banned from ever subscribing to your mailing list If a match occurs during the subscription process the request will be automatically rejected and the requester will get a rejection notice You can use this to permanently ban troublesome posters to a members only list private_roster This specifies who is allowed to view the roster of member addresses If you choose Anyone then the list membership is completely public You can limit exposure of the roster to just list members or just to the list administrators In the former case a user must enter a valid member s address and password before they can view the roster In the latter case a list administrator s password must be entered if a matching admin password is entered address field is ignored obscure_addresses Control
29. n of a list ad ministrator a welcome message can be sent to them The welcome message contains some common boilerplate information such as the name of the list instructions for posting to the list and the member s subscription pass word You can add additional information to the welcome message by typing the text into the welcome_msg text box Note that because this text is sent as part of an email it should not contain HTML send_welcome_msg This flag controls whether or not the welcome message is sent to new subscribers goodbye_msg Like the welcome_msg a goodbye message can be sent to members when they unsubscribe from the list Unlike the welcome message there s no boilerplate for the goodbye message Enter the entire goodbye message you d like unsubscribing members to receive into the goodbye_msg text box send_goodbye_msg This flag controls whether or not the goodbye message is sent to unsubscribing members admin_immed_notify List moderators get notifications of pending administrative actions such as subscription or unsubscription requests that require moderator approval or posted messages that are being held for moderator approval List moderators will always get a daily summary of such pending requests but they can also get immediate notifications when such a request is made The admin_immed_notify variable controls whether these immediate notifications are sent or not It s generally a good idea to leave this set to Yes
30. nabled its support you can set your list up to support any of about two dozen languages such as German Italian Japanese or Spanish Your list members can then choose any of your supported languages as their preferred language for interacting with the list Such things as their member options page will be displayed in this language Each mailing list also has its own preferred language which is the language the list supports if no other language context is known These variables control the language settings for your mailing list preferred_language This is the list s preferred language which is the language that the list administrative pages will be displayed in Also any messages sent to the list owners by Mailman will be sent in this language This option is presented as a drop down list containing the languages enabled in the available_languages variable available languages This set of checkboxes contains all the natural languages that your site administrator has made available to your mailing lists Select any language that you d either like your members to be able to view the list in or that you d like to be able to use in your list s preferred_language variable encode_ascii_prefixes If your mailing list s preferred language uses a non ASCII character set and the subject_ prefix contains non ASCII characters the prefix will always be encoded according to the relevant standards However if your subject prefix contains only ASCII charact
31. ome other things you can do to your list as well as convenient links to the list information page and the list archives Note the big Logout link use this if you re finished configuring your list and don t want to leave the session cookie active in your browser Below this common header you 1 find a list of this category s configuration variables arranged in two columns In the left column is a brief description of the option which also contains a details link For many of the variables more details are available describing the semantics of the various available settings or information on the interaction between this setting and other list options Clicking on the details link brings up a page which contains only the information for that option as well as a button for submitting your setting and a link back to the category page On the right side of the two column section you ll see the variable s current value Some variables may present a limited set of values via radio button or check box arrays Other variables may present text entry boxes of one or multiple lines Most variables control settings for the operation of the list but others perform immediate actions these are clearly labeled At the bottom of the page you ll find a Submit button and a footer with some more useful links and a few logos Hitting the submit button commits your list settings after they ve been validated Any invalid values will be
32. on list s posting address reply_to_address This is the address that will be added in the Reply To header if reply_goes_to_1list is set to Explicit address 6 2 The List Configuration Pages Umbrella list settings TBD Note that umbrella lists are deprecated and will be replaced with a better mechanism for Mailman 3 0 Notifications Mailman sends notifications to the list administrators or list members under a number of different circumstances Most of these notifications can be configured in this section but see the Bounce Processing and Auto responder categories for other notifications that Mailman can send send_reminders By default Mailman sends all list members a monthly password reminder This notice serves two purposes First it reminds people about all the lists they may be subscribed to on this domain including the lists where their subscription may be disabled Second it reminds people about their passwords for these lists as well as the url for their personal options pages so that they can more easily configure their subscription options Some people get annoyed with these monthly reminders and they can disable the reminders via their subscrip tion options page For some lists the monthly reminders aren t appropriate for any of the members so you can disable them list wide by setting the send_reminders variable to No welcome_msg When new members are subscribed to the list either by their own action or the actio
33. r you can add a footer to every message The same rules apply to digest footers as apply to digest headers digest_volume frequency Each digest is numbered with a volume and an issue This variable controls how often a new digest volume is sent When the digest volume number is incremented the issue number is reset to 1 new_volume This is an action variable which forces an increment of the volume number as soon as you submit the form send _digest_now This is another action variable Select Yes submit the form and the current digest is packaged up and sent to digest members regardless of size well there has to be at least one message in the digest 2 7 The Privacy Options Category The Privacy category lets you control how much of the list s information is public as well as who can send messages to your list It also contains some spam detection filters Note that this section is not used to control whether your list s archives are public or private for that use the category There are four sub categories e Subscription rules i e the rules for joining and leaving your mailing list e Sender filters the rules for who may post messages to your list e Recipient filters moderation rules based on the recipient of the message e Spam filters some regular expression based rules for header matching The sender recipient and spam filtering rules are part of the general list moderation features of Mailman When a mes
34. r is allowed to change various settings of the list such as the privacy and archiving policies the content filtering settings etc The list owner is also allowed to subscribe or invite members unsubscribe members and change any member s subscription options The list moderator on the other hand is only allowed to approve or reject postings and subscription requests The list moderator can also do things like clear a member s moderation flag or add an address to a list of approved non member posters Normally the list owner and list moderator are the same person In fact the list owner can always do all the tasks a list moderator can do Access to both the owner s configuration pages and the moderation pages are protected by the same password However 1f the list owner wants to delegate posting and subscription approval authority to other people a separate list moderator password can be set giving moderators access to the approval pages but not the configuration pages In this setup list owners can still moderate the list of course In the sections that follow we ll often use the terms list owner and list administrator interchangably meaning both roles When necessary we ll distinguish the list moderator explicitly 1 3 A Lists Web Pages Every mailing list is also accessible by a number of web pages Note that the exact urls are configurable by the site administrator so they may be different than what s described below W
35. s see below moderator This variable contains a list of email addresses one address per line of the list moderators These addresses are often used in combination with the owner addresses For example when you email mylist ownertexample com both the owner and moderator addresses will receive a copy of the mes sage description In the general list overview page which shows you every available mailing list each list is displayed with a short description The contents of this variable is that description Note that in emails from the mailing list this description is also used in the comment section of the To address This text should be relatively short and no longer than one line info This variable contains a longer description of the mailing list It is included at the top of the list s information page and it can contain HTML However blank lines will be automatically converted into paragraph breaks Preview your HTML though because unclosed or invalid HTML can prevent display of parts of the list infor mation page subject_prefix This is a string that will be prepended to the Subject header of any message posted to the list For example if a message is posted to the list with a Subject like Subject This is a message and the subject_prefixis My List note the trailing space then the message will be received like so Subject My List This is a message If you leave subject_prefix empty no prefix will be added to
36. s way If the list is not explicitly addressed and this setting is turned on the message will be held for moderator approval acceptable_aliases This is the list of alternative addresses that are acceptable as a list posting address when require_explicit_destination is enabled This is useful for when there aliases for the main posting address e g he lp example com may be an alias for he lp list example com max_num_recipients This is the maximum number of explicit recipients that are allowed on the posted message Spammers sometimes send messages with lots of explicit recipients so setting this number to a reasonable value may cut down on spam Spam Filters This section provides some adjuncts to spam fighting tools it doesn t replace dedicated anti spam tools such as Spa mAssassin or SpamBayes bounce_matching_headers This variable contains header regular expressions one per line and if any of a message s headers matches one of these patterns it will be held for moderation The format is a colon separated header and value where the header is case insensitive and the value is any valid Python regular expression Lines that start with are ignored This variable can be used to catch known spammers by writing regexps that match against To or Cc lines or known bad Message ID s Perhaps more useful though are patterns that match headers added by spam detection tools higher up in the tool chain For example you might configure
37. s for controlling the privacy of your lists distributing your list as personalized postings or digests gatewaying postings to and from Usenet and providing automatic bounce detection Mailman provides a built in archiver multiple natural languages as well as advanced content and topic filtering Mailman provides several interfaces to its functionality Most list administrators will primarily use the web interface to customize their lists There is also a limited email command interface to the administrative functions as well as a command line interface if you have shell access on the Mailman server This document does not cover the command line interface see the GNU Mailman site administrator s manual for more details 1 1 A List s Email Addresses Every mailing list has a set of email addresses that messages can be sent to There s always one address for posting messages to the list one address that bounces will be sent to and addresses for processing email commands For example for a mailing list called mylist example com you d find these addresses e mylist example com this is the email address people should use for new postings to the list e mylist join example com by sending a message to this address a new member can request subscrip tion to the list Both the Subject header and body of such a message are ignored Note that mylist subscribe example com is an alias for the join address e mylist leave example com
38. s whether some simple obfuscation of addresses is used when member addresses are in cluded on web pages This should reduce the opportunity for email address harvesting by spammers although it probably doesn t eliminate it 2 7 The Privacy Options Category 13 Sender filters When a message is posted to the list a series of moderation criteria is applied to determine the disposition of the message This section contains the moderation controls for postings from both members and non members default member_moderation Member postings are held for moderation if their moderation flag is turned on Note that only the list administrators can change the value of a member s moderation flag You can control whether new members get their moderation flag turned on or off by default when they subscribe to the list By turning this flag off by default postings by members will be allowed without further intervention barring other restrictions such as size or implicit recipient lists see below By turning the flag on you can quarantine new member postings to make sure that they meet your criteria for netiquette topicality etc Once you determine that the new member understands the community s posting rules you can turn off their moderation flag and let their postings go through unstopped E newsletter style lists can also be set up by using the moderation flag By setting the member_ moderation_action to Reject and by turning off the modera
39. sage is posted to the list it is matched against a number of criteria the outcome of which determines whether the message is reflected to the membership or not In general the outcome is one of four states e Approved or Accepted the message may be sent on to the members of the mailing list e Hold the message will be held for moderator approval The list owners and moderators will then have to explicitly approve the message before the list members will see it e Reject the message is bounced back to the original sender often with a notice containing the reason the message was rejected The list members never see rejected messages 12 2 The List Configuration Pages e Discard the message is simply thrown away without further processing Many of the fields in this section are text boxes accepting addresses one per line Unless otherwise noted these also accept regular expressions which will be matched against an address if the line begins with a caret character Subscription rules This subcategory controls the rules for exposing the existence of this list and for what new members must do in order to subscribe to the list advertised This option controls whether this list will show up in the list overview for the site Normally an overview contains the name and short description of every mailing list in the virtual domain By setting this variable to No it will not show up in this overview nor will it show up in
40. ther by the list administrator or the user However they will receive occasional reminders that their membership has been disabled and these reminders will include information about how to re enable their membership You can control both the number of reminders the member will receive and the frequency with which these reminders are sent There is one other important configuration variable after a certain period of time during which no bounces from the member are received the bounce information is considered stale and discarded Thus by adjusting this value and the score threshold you can control how quickly bouncing members are disabled You should tune both of these to the frequency and traffic volume of your list bounce_processing Specifies whether or not this list should do automatic bounce processing bounce_score_threshold This is the bounce score above which a member s subscription will be automatically dis abled When the subscription is re enabled their bounce score will be reset to zero This value can be a floating point number bounce _info_stale_after The number of days after which a member s bounce information is considered stale If no new bounces have been received in the interim the bounce score is reset to zero This value must be an integer bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings The number of notices a disabled member will receive before their address is removed from the mailing list s roster Set this to 0 to imme
41. tion flag for just the few approved senders your list will operate in essentially a one way direction Note that you d also need to reject or discard postings from non members member_moderation_action This is the action to take for postings from a member who s moderation flag is set For typical discussion lists you ll likely set this to Hold so that the list moderator will get a chance to manually approve reject or discard the message For e newsletter and announcement lists you might want to set this to Reject or Discard Note that when a moderated member posts to your list and the member_moderation_action is set to Hold the message will appear on the administrative requests page When you dispose of the message you will be given an opportunity to clear the moderation flag at the same time If you re quarantining new posts this makes it very convenient to both approve a new member s post and de moderate them at the same time member_moderation notice When a member s moderation flag is turned on and member_moderation_action is Reject this variable contains the text sent in the rejection notice The next group of settings control messages whose From domain publishes a DMARC p reject or p quarantine policy dmarc_moderation_action These actions Accept Munge From Wrap Message Reject and Discard apply only to messages whose From domain publishes a DMARC p reject or optionally see the next setting p quarantine policy If t
42. to the RFC 1153 digest standard They retain some but not all of the original messages but can also include a summary and headers and footers Like non digest delivery you can enable or disable digest delivery but you cannot disable both types of delivery You can specify different headers and footers for digest and non digest deliveries You cannot personalize digest deliveries As list administrator you may want to send an urgent message to all list members bypassing the normal digest bundling To do this send the message with a Urgent header where the value of the header is the list administrator s password Non digest members will receive the message like normal but digest members will receive the message immediately Here are the variables which control digest delivery digestable The option controls whether members can receive digest deliveries or not If not they will be forced to receive immediate deliveries You can t disable digests if non digests are already disabled digest is default Controls which style of delivery is the default for new members You can choose Regular non digest or Digest delivery Usually it makes no difference which of user_address and user_delivered_to is used but it s important to remember that they can be different When they re different Mailman always uses the lower case address as the key to the member s subscription information but it always delivers messages to the case preserve
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