In a previous article I explained what a mailing list is and what it is used for. Now I would like to give you some practical advises on how to setup and manage mailing lists at FreeHostia.

As explained the previous article, a mailing list is a collective address of a group of people. It could be used to send a message to a group of recipients subscribed to the list. Which bring us to the first question, which needs to be answered…

How to subscribe for a mailing list

When you create a mailing list in Email Options > Mailing Lists you fill in several fields – address of the list, admin password and admin email. The admin email is the email address of the mailing list administrator.

At FreeHostia we use Majordomo – a popular mailing list manager. It does not have a web interface, instead an “email interface” is used. You send commands to Majorodomo via email. The address, which you send the commands to is majordomo@my-best-domain.com where ‘my-best-domain.com’ is your domain name. The subject of the email is of no importance, what is important is the body.

To subscribe someone for the mailing list you send an email from the admin email to majordomo@my-best-domain.com with the following content:

approve password subscribe list@my-best-domain.com subscriber@my-best-domain.com

What this command “tells” to Majordomo is that you want to subscribe subscriber@my-best-domain.com to list list@my-best-domain.com, whose password is ‘password’. You can send more than one command in the same email – just put each command on a new line.

The afore mentioned example shows you how to subscribe someone if you are the admin. What if someone wants to subscribe to your list? The user can do this by sending an email to majordomo@my-best-domain.com with the following command:

subscribe list@my-best-domain.com

Unless you have setup the list in such a way that authorization from admin is required for new subscribers, the above command will subscribe the user for your mailing list.

How to unsubscribe?

The process is similar to subscribing, what is different is the command, which you use. Instead of ’subscribe’ you use ‘unsubscribe’, eg.:

approve password unsubscribe list@my-best-domain.com subscriber@my-best-domain.com

or respectively:

unsubscribe list@my-best-domain.com

What else can I do?

Other useful commands that you can use with Majordomo are:

get <list> <filename>
Get a file related to <list>.

index <list>
Return an index of files you can “get” for <list>.

which [<address>]
Find out which lists you (or <address> if specified) are on.

who <list>
Find out who is on the named <list>.

info <list>
Retrieve the general introductory information for the named <list>.

lists
Show the lists served by this Majordomo server.

help
Retrieve this message

end
Stop processing commands (useful if your mailer adds a signature).