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All Mailman List Administration Tasks
This section of the Mailman documentation is organized in the same order
as the web interface, and lists suggested configurations and settings
for all configuration options/administrative tasks available to Mailman
list administrators (owners). In general, the web interface for managing
your Mailman lists provides excellent explanation of each of the following
options, right on the web page where you choose the settings. To access
the web interface for your list, refer to the email you received either
when the list was created or as a monthly reminder. However, in some cases,
settings most appropriate for the UVa community or for specific list actions
are not intuitive. We have done our best to provide additional documentation
for those cases below.
Initial Options
- List administrator addresses: Addresses of list owners. You may add
additional list owners in this field, or transfer ownership to a new
owner.
- Terse phrase identifying this list: Appears when the mailing list
is listed with other mailing lists, or in headers, and so forth. It
should be as succinct as you can get it, while still identifying what
the list is.
- Introductory description of list (a few paragraphs): Included at top
of list info web page.
- Notifications:
- Send monthly password reminders: Default is No.
When set to Yes, sends reminder to list members
of their list configuration password once a month. List members
may also set this option individually.
- Send welcome message to new subscribers?: Default is Yes.
Sends automatic welcome message, including important addresses and
URLs for the mailing list, plus any prepended text entered in the
field below this option, to new members when they are subscribed.
If you want to include mission-specific kinds of things in the initial
message, like etiquette policies or team orientation, add it here.
You can also edit the welcome message by using the link on
the list administrator's website for Edit the
public HTML pages and text files and then the
link for Welcome email text file.
- Send goodbye message?: Default is Yes. Sends
automatic goodbye message indicating they have been unsubscribed
from the list, plus any prepended text entered in the field below
this option, to members when they are unsubscribed.
- Immediate and daily notices to list moderators: Default is Yes,
which means list moderators receive a daily email message alerting
them that messages are waiting for review before distribution to
the list, as well as an immediate email message as soon as a message
is held for review. Setting this option to No generates
an email to list moderators daily of all messages that are awaiting
review. For more information on processing pending moderated messages,
see the section on moderation.
- Send mail to poster while pending approval?: Default is No,
which means senders of messages submitted to a moderated list or
messages that meet another hold-for-review criteria will not receive
an automatic email notifying them their message is pending approval
before being posted to the list. Changing this setting to Yes
enables the auto-notification to the sender of any message that
is held for review.
- Privacy:
- Access to subscription lists: Default is Anyone,
which means anyone who knows the list name can see a list of members.
Setting this option to List members means only
people subscribed to the list may access a listing of members. Setting
this option to List admin only means only list
owners, not list members or non-members, are able to see a list
of members.
- Subscription policies: Default is Confirm new
subscriptions, which means that a subscriber email confirmation
is required. Setting this option to Require approve
requires list owner approval for subscriptions. Setting it to None
means that subscribing email addresses to the list is not reviewed.
Setting it to Confirm and approve means the list
owner must approve the subscription and the subscriber must confirm
(usually by visiting a web site) their membership in the list: both
must approve the subscription or the email address of the subscriber
will not appear in the list.
- Unsubscription policies: Default is No, do not
require list owner approval for unsubscription requests. Setting
this option to Yes means the list owner must approve
each request by a member to be removed from the list.
- Moderation:
- Moderate new listmember postings: Default is No.
Setting this option to Yes means postings by any
member added to the list after this setting is turned on will be
moderated (need to have their message reviewed prior to distribution
to list members).
- Non-listmember posts: Default is Accept, which
means messages sent to the list by non-listmembers whose email addresses
do not appear in an explicit Hold, Reject or Discard list will be
posted to the list without further approval. Other options:
- Hold: list administrator is notified by email
of posting from any non-listmember whose email address does
not appear on an explicit Accept, Reject or Discard list.
- Reject: automatically rejects all postings
to the list from non-listmembers whose email addresses do not
appear in an explicit Accept, Hold or Discard list, and sends
email to sender notifying them message has been rejected. This
setting is not recommended as it will send a rejection notice
back to spam senders, and can cause the list to receive more
spam messages.
- Discard: automatically discards messages
from non-listmembers whose email addresses do not appear in
an explicit Accept, hold or Reject list.
- Anti-spam filters: Default is No, which allows all
messages sent to the list that meet all other automatic approval for
destination options to be distributed to list members immediately. The
Yes setting catches postings which do not have the
list name explicitly in the To or Cc field. When set to Yes,
postings where the list address appears only in the Bcc field are held
for review, as messages where addresses appear in the Bcc field may
be spam email messages.
General Options
Many of the initial options described above, plus:
- Public name of list (only case changes possible). Changing a list
name requires deleting and recreating it, a non-trivial action which
must be requested by emailing postmaster@virginia.edu
- Prefix for subject line of postings: Will appear in subject of each
message sent to list. For example [Samplelist] Meeting Today.
- Hide sender address and replace with list address: For anonymous lists.
Removes From, Sender and Reply-To fields.
- Strip first Reply-to header: Default is No.
- Direct message replies to: Default is sender, which
is strongly recommended. Setting to This list means
all replies go back to the list, which is discouraged by the etiquette
of many lists. Setting to an Explicit address means
all replies are sent to an address selected by the list administrator,
and are not posted to the list or to the message sender, which is useful
for off-list discussions.
- Umbrella list settings: for lists which are made up of other lists.
- Send password reminders and other administrative emails to -owner
address instead of directly to user.
- Suffix for list when list is umbrella list.
- Additional settings:
- Emergency moderation of all list traffic: Default is No.
Setting this option to Yes is useful when a situation
with the list, such as a thread identified as inappropriate by list
members or owners, or a series of virus-laden messages, are causing
problems when sent to the list.
- Default options for new members: Default is Filter out
duplicate messages to list members (if possible). Other
options that may also be checked by either the administrator or
member include:
- Conceal member's address (when members query
for list membership)
- Automatically acknowledge the member's posting
- Do not send copy of member's own post to member,
which means the member does not receive the posting he or she
sent to the list.
- Administrivia filter: Default is Yes, which catches
postings sent to list that are meant as an administrative request
(like subscribe, unsubscribe, etc), and adds them to the the administrative
requests queue, notifying the administrator of the new request.
- Maximum message body length: Default is 100 KB,
which should be large enough for nearly all normal text-only postings,
but will prevent delivery of many messages which contain attachments.
Setting this option to 0 removes the size limitation
on messages.
- RFC 2369 headers: Default is Yes, which defines
a set of List-* headers that are normally added to every message
sent to the list membership. These greatly aid end-users who are
using standards compliant mail readers. They should normally always
be enabled.
- Include list-post header: Default is Yes. However
for some announce-only mailing lists, only a very select group of
people are allowed to post to the list; the general membership is
usually not allowed to post. For lists of this nature, the List-Post:
header is misleading and should be set to No.
Passwords
Passwords may be set for just the list administrator (owner), who is
the person or people with ultimate control over all parameters of a mailing
list. If desired, list moderators may be designated by the list administrator.
Moderators have more limited permissions; they are not able to change
any list configuration variable, but they are allowed to tend to pending
administration requests, including approving or rejecting held subscription
requests, and disposing of held postings. Of course, the list administrators
can also tend to pending requests.
In order to split the list ownership duties into administrators and moderators,
you must set a separate moderator password, and also provide the email
addresses of the list moderators in the general options
section.
Language Options
Default language is set to English (USA). Many other
languages are available. If a member selects another language, messages
to the member from Mailman will be in the language selected. Note: messages
sent by someone posting to the list will not appear in the selected language,
only administrative email messages from Mailman and administrative web
pages (for example, the member's list options page) will be displayed in
the selected language.
Membership Management
See the section on Adding/Removing
List Members above under Common Options.
Digest Options
Lists may either be digested or non-digested or both. The default is
both non-digested and digested - members can select which
delivery mode they prefer, to receive each message to the list as a separate
email when the message arrives at the list (non-digested), or to receive
messages sent to the list collected into a single message that is distributed
periodically (digested). If both options remain available, list members
will have the opportunity to select either non-digest or digest delivery
mode - a single member cannot select both. The default for new list members
and the frequency of the distribution of the digest are set by the list
administrator under Options for digested members.
- Options for non-digested members:
- Subscribers receive list messages immediately: Default is Yes.
Setting this option to no means you are creating
a list in which all members will receive the list postings in digest
delivery mode. If this option is set to yes, new members will be
non-digested members unless they specifically change their non-digested
delivery mode to digested delivery mode or the list administrator
sets the default delivery mode to digested (see Options
for digested members)
- Header added to mail sent to regular list members: Default is blank. Add text here if you want specific information
to be included at the top of every message distributed to a non-digested
list member.
- Footer added to mail sent to regular list members: If you want specific information to appear at the bottom
of each message sent to a non-digested list member, you
would include it here. If you want no footer, you
would delete all existing information.
- Scrub attachments of regular delivery message: Default is No. When you scrub attachments, they are stored in archive area and links are made
in the message so that the member can access via web browser. Note: The links added to messages from which attachments have been "scrubbed" may not contain the original filename's extension.
- Options for digested members:
- Receive list traffic collected in digests: Default is Yes.
Setting this option to no means you are disabling
the ability of list members to choose receive list messages in digest
format.
- Default delivery mode for new members: Default is Regular.
Setting this option to Digest means new list members
will receive postings in digested format. Members may change their
delivery mode to receive list messages in digested or non-digested
format at any time, providing the list administrator allows both
choices.
- Default digest format: Default is Plain.
- Digest size: Default is 30 Kb, which means the
aggregated digested messages must reach a size of 30 Kb before being
sent out.
- Daily digest override: Default is Yes, which
means that even if the s of digest do not reach the default
size by the end of the day, a digested message is sent out containing
the current s.
- Header added to every digest: Default is blank. Add text here if you want specific
information to be included at the top of every digest message posted.
- Footer added to every digest: If you want specific information to appear at the bottom
of each message sent to a digested list member, you
would include it here. If you want no footer, you
would delete all existing information.
- Frequency of digest volume: Default is monthly.
Other options are yearly, quarterly, weekly, and
daily. Depending on the amount of activity on your
list, you may wish to set less frequent digest volumes (yearly or
monthly for relatively inactive lists) or more frequent digest volumes
(weekly or daily for more active lists).
- Start a new digest volume: Default is No.
- Send digest now, if not empty: Default is No.
Privacy Options
Privacy settings allow you to configure subscription and membership exposure
policy for your list. You can also control whether a list is public or
not. See also the Archiving Options section for
separate archive-related privacy settings.
- Subscription rules:
- Privacy options detailed in Initial Options,
plus the following options:
- Advertise list when people ask what lists are on this machine:
Default is No, and it is strongly recommended that
this setting stay no. Choosing Yes means the name
and address of the list are publicly available to anyone on the
internet browsing for list addresses at U.Va.
- Banned addresses: As administrator, you may list specific addresses
who are banned from ever subscribing to the list. These may be ex-members
who routinely abused list privileges, or persons for whom membership
in your list is inappropriate. If you are in doubt about the appropriateness
of posts or activity of list members, list members should send the
offending message(s) along with a note explaining the concern to
the list administrator (example address: sample-owner@Virginia.edu;
list administrators should send the offending message(s) along with
a note explaining the concern to abuse@virginia.edu for advice.
- Obscure membership addresses: Default is Yes,
which means email addresses of list members are displayed on the
web in a format that does not make them easily obtainable by automatic
web crawling agents designed to collect addresses for purposes of
spamming them. It is strongly recommended you leave this setting
as Yes.
- Sender filters
- Privacy options detailed in Initial Options,
plus the following options:
- Action to take when a moderated member posts to the list: Default
is Hold which means that all messages sent by a
moderated member to the list address are held for review before
distribution to the members of the list; other options are Reject,
which deletes the message without distributing it to the members
of the list and sends a rejection notice to the sender of the message
and Discard, which deletes the message without
distributing it to the members of the list without notifying the
sender
- Text to include in any rejection notice to be sent to moderated
members who post to this list: Default is none; enter whatever text
you want to appear in a rejection notice for the list.
- List of non-member addresses whose postings should be automatically
accepted. Messages sent from any of the addresses specified will
be distributed to list members without review/approval by the list
administrator, providing all of list criteria are met. Regular expressions
can be used to indicate a generic form of an address.
For example, the regular expression ^.*@.*virginia.edu will allow
anyone whose email address ends with virginia.edu to have their
message distributed directly to list members. Warning: regular expressions
can cause unintended chaos: use them with great caution.
- List of non-member addresses whose postings will be immediately
held for moderation.
List of non-member addresses whose postings will be automatically
rejected.
List of non-member addresses whose postings will be automatically
discarded.
A message to the list from an email address specified in one of
these boxes will always be processed according to the box into which
the address is placed: it will be held for review by the list administrator
(hold for moderation), deleted with notification to its sender of
the deletion (rejected) or deleted without notification to its sender
(discarded). Regular expressions can be used to indicate a generic
form of an address. For example, the regular expression ^.*@.*spam.site
placed in the discard box will cause any message whose From: address
ends with spam.site to be deleted. Warning: regular expressions
can cause unintended chaos: use them with caution.
- Should messages from non-members, which are automatically discarded,
be forwarded to the list moderator? This option allows the moderator
to see the messages that are otherwise deleted without notification.
- Text to include in any rejection notice to be sent to non-members who post to this list. This option allows the list administrator to customize the email notice sent to non-members when their email message to the list is rejected.
- Recipient filters
- Spam filters
- Filter rules to match against the headers of a message. Each header filter rule has two parts, a list of regular expressions, one per line, and an action to take. Mailman matches the message's headers against every regular expression in the rule and if any match, the message is rejected, held, or discarded based on the action you specify. Use Defer to temporarily disable a rule. You can have more than one filter rule for your list. In that case, each rule is matched in turn, with processing stopped after the first match. Note that headers are collected from all the attachments (except for the mailman administrivia message) and matched against the regular expressions. With this feature, you can effectively sort out messages with dangerous file types or file name extensions.
- Hold posts with header value matching a specified regexp. Regular expressions entered in this section will be matched against values
present in the specified header of incoming messages. The message will be held
if a match is found, disregarding letter case.
Bounce Processing
A message to a list member which fails in delivery and is returned to
Mailman is treated as a "bounce." 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. If a member address cannot be extracted,
the bounce is discarded. If the member address can be extracted, the instance
is logged by Mailman for that member, and after a certain threshold of
bounces is reached for a particular member, the member is automatically
unsubscribed from the list.
Unless list administrators have specific reasons for wanting to handle
bounce processing with different settings, we strongly recommend leaving
the defaults for bounce processing as they are set upon initial list creation.
For those interested, a more detailed description of how bounce processing
occurs follows.
Detailed description of bounce processing:
- Mailman assesses the type of failure and assigns a score to it (either
0.5 or 1.0). Once a day, that score is added to the bounce-score for
that member - so, if there are 10 failed mail messages in one day for
an address, the maximum added to the score for that address is 1.0.
- Should mail begin to be delivered to the person again and Mailman
be able to deliver messages without problem for a week, then the bounce
score is reset to zero.
- When the bounce score goes over the threshold limit (the default is
5), the member's list membership is set to "No mail", and
Mailman attempts to notify the list member this action has happened
and how to reverse the setting. The list administrator is also notified
of this action.
- No further attempts to deliver messages will happen until the "No
mail" setting is changed - either by the list administrator or
by the list member.
- Mailman will attempt to notify the list member of the "No mail"
setting 2 more times - at 7 day intervals. If, at the end of that time,
the person's email address is still unreachable, the member's email
address is removed from the list and the list administrator is notified
that the person's email address has been removed from the list.
Archiving
Archiving on all lists is off by default. To request that archiving be
turned on for your list, email postmaster@virginia.edu. Include the name
of your list and a request that is be enabled for archiving.
- Public or private archive: Default is Private.
- Archive volume frequency: Default is Monthly, which
means a new archive volume will be created each month the list is in
operation. Archives may be kept on ITC's servers until they exceed a
size of X, at which point archives will be deleted by oldest date. Other
frequency options are Yearly, Quarterly, Weekly, or
Daily.
Mail and News Gateways
Please contact postmaster@Virginia.edu to create or disable
a gateway between the list and a newsgroup.
Auto Response Options
As list administrator, you may set several options for automatic responses
to messages sent to your list, which may cut down on the amount of administrivia
you need to perform as list administrator.
- Autoresponse to mailing list posters: Default is No.
Setting this option to Yes allows you to enter text
for an automatic response each time someone posts to the list.
- Copy of autoresponse emails to -owner address. Default is No.
Setting this option to Yes sends a copy of each autoresponse
to you as list administrator. Recommended setting is No.
- Autoresponse to messages sent to -request address: Default is No.
- Autoresponse grace period: Default is set to 90 days,
and is only enabled if you choose to send autoresponses. The option
means a message poster will only receive an autoresponse to messages
posted to the list once every 90 days. Setting this option to 0 will
send an autoresponse to every message from the poster.
Filtering
When a message is received by the list and you have enabled filtering,
messages are evaluated for attachment types. Attachments that do not fit
those defined as allowed are stripped from incoming messages before posting
to the list. After this initial filtering, any multipart attachments that
are empty are removed. If the outer message is left empty after this filtering,
then the whole message is discarded.
- Filter of list traffic?: Default is No. Setting
this option to Yes enables you to define attachment
types to limit or allow.
- Remove attachments that do not match selected types: Default types
are already defined (multipart/mixed, multipart/alternative, and text/plain)
which include most safe types of email attachments. Add any other types
here you want your list to receive, but beware that adding other attachment
types here may cause unwanted attachments to be delivered to your list.
- Remove message attachments that have a matching
filename extension: Mailman will remove attachments with matching filename extensions from messages distributed to list subscribers. You must set filter of list traffic to Yes to enable this filter.
- Remove message attachments that don't have a
matching filename extension: Mailman will remove attachments without matching filename extensions from messages distributed to list subscribers. You must set filter of list traffic to Yes to enable this filter.
Topics
Topics are similar to automated keywords. The list
administrator defines topics and list members can
then process incoming messages based on the topics.
- Enable topic filter: Default is Disabled. Enabling
topic filter lets you ...
- Body lines to scan with topic filter: Default is 5.
[What does this do?]
- Topic keywords to match: Give each topic a name, then enter keywords,
one per line, for the topic filter to scan for when sorting messages
by topic.
Moderation Options
Go to the Moderation section of this
documentation.
Edit the Public HTML Pages and Text Files
Mailman gives you the ability to edit the public HTML pages and text files for your
list. Usually, there is no reason to change the default information displayed
on these pages, but the option exists should you need it. To edit these
pages, choose Edit the public HTML pages and text files under Other
Administrative Activities from your list's management web page.
Select a page to edit:
- General list information page: The publicly viewable page that contains
information about the name and purpose of your list, as well as links
for subscribing.
- Subscribe results page: List members see this page upon successfully
subscribing to the list via the web interface.
- User specific options page: This is the page list members see when
they click on the link to modify their options for list membership.
- Welcome email text file: The welcome email is sent to new list subscribers.
If you inadvertently change the HTML code or other of your list
action HTML pages so that they no longer display correctly, there is an
option to reset the of each of these pages back to the default.
To reset your list action HTML pages to default:
- While in the list administration page, under Other Administrative
Activities, select Edit the public HTML pages and text files.
- Select the page to edit (General list information page, Subscribe
results page, User specific options page, or Welcome email text file).
- At the bottom of each page, under the HTML view window, click the
button Restore to default, then click Restore
to default again to confirm the change, or click cancel
to leave your page as currently configured.
List Archive Viewing
After archiving of messages has been enabled by
postmaster@Virginia.edu for a list, every message to
the list is stored. Archives are available to
the list administrator via the
Go to list archives
link available from the list administrative website
whose address is similar to:
http://list.mail.virginia.edu/mailman/admin/list_name
In the above, replace list_name with the name of your list.
Note that should an archive become overly large (which,
are present, is undefined), the archive will be truncated
from its beginning and the list administrator notified.
There is no way to edit nor download an archive.
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