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Manual
_________________________________________________________________
GNU Mailman - List Administration Manual
Barry A. Warsaw
Release 2.1
December 14, 2009
Front Matter
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
o 1.1 A List's Email Addresses
o 1.2 Administrative Roles
o 1.3 A List's Web Pages
o 1.4 Basic Architectural Overview
+ 2 The List Configuration Pages
o 2.1 The General Options Category
o 2.2 The Passwords Category
o 2.3 The Language Options Category
o 2.4 The Membership Management Category
o 2.5 The Non-digest Options Category
o 2.6 The Digest Options Category
o 2.7 The Privacy Options Category
o 2.8 The Bounce Processing Category
o 2.9 The Archiving Options Category
o 2.10 The Mail/News Gateway Category
o 2.11 The Auto-responder Category
o 2.12 The Content Filtering Category
o 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
+ 1 This is an Appendix
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
features 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:
* mylist@example.com - this is the email address people should use
for new postings to the list.
* mylist-join@example.com - by sending a message to this address, a
new member can request subscription 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.
* mylist-leave@example.com - 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.
* mylist-owner@example.com - This address reaches the list owner and
list moderators directly.
* 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.
* mylist-bounces@example.com - This address receives bounces from
members who's 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.
* 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.
1.2 Administrative Roles
There are two primary administrative roles for each mailing list, a
list owner and a list moderator. A list owner 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, if 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 List's Web Pages
Every mailing list is also accessible by a number of web pages. Note
that the exact urls is configurable by the site administrator, so they
may be different than what's described below. We'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 membership 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 visit
http://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 that 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 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 are represented 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^1.
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 ``Configuration 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 some 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'll 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 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 information. In the
descriptions that follow, the variable name is given first, along with
an overview and a description of what that variable controls.
2.1.1 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 in mylist@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 mylist, the real name can be
Posting.
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 addresses (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-owner@example.com, both the owner and
moderator addresses will receive a copy of the message.
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 information 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_prefix is [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
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 vagarities of the email
standards, you may or may not want to add a trailing space.
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 about this kind of identity leakage.
2.1.2 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 uses 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:
* Reply-To Munging Considered Harmful
* 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:
header to the message.
If 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 discussion list's posting address.
reply_to_address
This is the address that will be added in the Reply-To: header
if reply_goes_to_list is set to Explicit address.
2.1.3 Umbrella list settings
TBD. Note that umbrella lists are deprecated and will be replace with
a better mechanism for Mailman 3.0.
2.1.4 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 subscription 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 action of a list administrator, 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 password. 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.
admin_notify_mchanges
This variable controls whether the list administrators should
get notifications when members 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.
2.1.5 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.
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 member 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 mylist@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 not 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 fix it.
include_rfc2369_headers
RFC 2369 is an internet standard that describes a bunch of
headers that mailing list managers 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 membership 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-*
headers.)
2.2 The Passwords Category
As mentioned above, there are two primary administrative roles for
mailing lists. In this 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.
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 enabled 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 language 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 characters, 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 you 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 call digests one or a few times a
day, or they can receive messages immediately whenever the message is
posted to the list. 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 information 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 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. Personalized messages
avoid this problem by encoding information in certain headers 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 %(list_name)s is substituted with he name of the
mailing list. Note that the trailing "s" is required^2.
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^3.
host_name
This is the domain name part of the email address for this
list.
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 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 with^4.
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 to the RFC 1153 digest standard. The 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^5.
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.
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.
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 header, 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:
* Subscription rules - i.e. the rules for joining and leaving your
mailing list
* Sender filters - the rules for who may post messages to your list
* Recipient filters - moderation rules based on the recipient of the
message
* 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 message 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:
* Approved or Accepted - the message may be sent on to the members
of the mailing list.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
2.7.1 Subscription rules
This subcategory controls the rules for exposing the existance 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 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:
+ 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.
+ 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-join@example.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.
+ 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.
+ Confirm and approve - Here, a mail-back notice must first be
confirmed by the requester. Once confirmed, 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 expressiosn), 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 enter; if a matching admin
password is entered, address field is ignored.
obscure_addresses
Controls whether some simple obfuscation of addresses is used
when member addresses are included on web pages. This should
reduce the opportunity for email address harvesting by
spammers, although it probably doesn't eliminate it.
2.7.2 Sender filters
When a message is posted to the list, a series of moderation criteria
are applied to determine the disposition of the message. This section
contains the modeation 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 moderation 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 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.
hold_these_nonmembers
Postings from non-members whose addresses match this list are
held for moderator approval.
reject_these_nonmembers
Postings from non-members whose addresses match this list are
rejected, i.e. bounced back to the original sender. There
currently is 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
administrative 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 lsit administrators or not.
2.7.3 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 this 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. help@example.com may be an alias for
help-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.
2.7.4 Spam Filters
This section provides some adjuncts to spam fighting tools; it doesn't
replace dedicated anti-spam tools such as SpamAssassin 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 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.
2.8 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, either 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 disabled. 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
Thenumber of days after which a member's bounce information is
considered stale. If no new bounces have been received in the
interrim, 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 immediately 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.
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 basis. 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
1 This is an Appendix
To create an appendix in a Python HOWTO document, use markup like
this:
\appendix
\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.
About this document ...
GNU Mailman - List Administration Manual, December 14, 2009, Release
2.1
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator.
LaTeX2HTML is Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, Nikos Drakos,
Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds, and Copyright ©
1997, 1998, Ross Moore, Mathematics Department, Macquarie University,
Sydney.
The application of LaTeX2HTML to the Python documentation has been
heavily tailored by Fred L. Drake, Jr. Original navigation icons were
contributed by Christopher Petrilli.
_________________________________________________________________
Footnotes
... representation^1
Specifically, a Python pickle
... required^2
The site administrator can configure lists to use a simpler
interpolation format, where $list_name or ${list_name} would be
substituted with the mailing list's name. Ask your site
administrator if the've configured your list this way.
... list^3
For backward compatibility, the variable _internal_name is
equivalent.
... with^4
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-preserved version.
... immediately^5
They'll also receive the message in the digest.
_________________________________________________________________
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Manual
_________________________________________________________________
Release 2.1, documentation updated on December 14, 2009.