Mailman

Introduction

Mailman is a program for e-mail lists. It can be useful for classes, conferences, seminars, or cooperative projects where many emails are sent out to the same group of people.

By default, Mailman archives all the messages sent to lists. For security, the archives are only available to list members, and lists available on the server are also private.

Setup

To begin, contact Support about setting up a Mailman list, only support has the ability to create lists. Once this is done you will receive an e-mail giving you the web administration address, as well as a web address for members to subscribe and change their preferences. As the admin, you will still have to subscribe to the list to receive postings.

Do not forget your owner password which will be provided, you will need this to make changes to your list. You can change this password but do not use you unix password for this. Pick something you'd use for an insecure web site.

Using Mailman Lists

Once your list has subscribers, send an email to listname@stat.osu.edu and all the members that are subscribed to that list will receive the email. Members can subscribe and unsubscribe on their own, and even find out who is already part of a list.

Remember that members can reply-all to everyone on the list, and by default a normal reply just goes to the poster.

By default, only member of a list can post to it. If a non-member posts, or someone uses a different e-mail to post, the post will be sent to the list admin for approval. The poster will also get a message telling them why their posting was not posted.

If someone who is not on the list attempts to post, you can view the messages from the admin page, and there are several options as to what to do with them.

Web Administration Addresses

All configuration of the lists can be done through the web, thus these URLs are key.

If the list is called listname, the admin site will be:
          https://www.stat.osu.edu/mailman/admin/listname
the user web page will be:
          https://www.stat.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/listname

Subscribing Users

The easiest way is for users to go to the user web page. There is an option to subscribe there. Also the admin can add people using the admin site. If you have a long list of people to add, support can add them for you.

By default, each subscribe request will generate a mail back to the requestor for confimation. The is done by simply replying to the confirmation messge. Once this is done the users will get a final e-mail welcoming them to the list, and explaining how to use the list. This will also contain the password they picked, or one will be gereated for them randomly.

After subscribing to the list the members can go to their personal options page, and change options such as: receive the list in digest form, hide their e-mail address, text/html format, etcetra.

Admin Management Interface

There are many, many option that can be set from the admin web page. The best thing is to go to your list's page and see what setting are best. For most lists, the defaults should be fine.

Some things that can be changed include:

• Show/hide poster e-mail addresses

• Add additional admins

• Where replies go

• What kind of messages members get when changing options

• Send [un]subscribe notices to the admin

• Moderate the list or not

• Max message size (default is normally enough)

• Advertise the list (bad for spam)

• Confirm subscriptions or not

• Ban addresses

• Archive options

• Digest options

• Filters

• many more...

Mail Interface

Like Majordomo previously, Mailman can take commands from e-mail when sent to listname-request@stat.osu.edu. However, the web interface tends to be much more straightforward. Thus, for info on the e-mail interface send a message to listname-request@stat.osu.edu, with the word help in the subject or in the body.

Also, members can contact the owner of the list by sending mail to listname-owner@stat.osu.edu.

Full Documentation

This is just an introduction. Full documentation is available at: http://www.list.org.