TWiki> CF Web>Email>MailManManagement>MailManManagementGuide (2020-11-15, AdrianPepper) EditAttach

Adrian Pepper's Simple Quick-Start Guide to Using Mailman Lists

  • (rendered for 'sample' list)

How to use this page

View this page as https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/twiki/view/CF/MailManManagementGuide?mmlist=LISTNAME but replace the word LISTNAME with the actual page name for your list. (Perhaps you have already done that...)

How to use this page (for off-campus mailman sites)

Full parameters available are https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/twiki/view/CF/MailManManagementGuide?mmlist=LISTNAME&mmhost=HOSTNAME&mmmm=URIPART&mmhttp=HTTPPREFIX

E.g. https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/twiki/view/CF/MailManManagementGuide?mmlist=mailman-users&mmhost=mail.python.org&mmmm=/mailman/&mmhttp=https://

Most references will require authentication, of course, but the following (listinfo) should work for everyone.

The only the links you likely need

You can navigate to most of the following via the general administration page

(But some of the options can be difficult to find there).

You will probably find it convenient to create a page, or set of browser bookmarks, containing the following links. The first time you click on one of these administrator pages for a particular list, you will need to give the password.

Note where the page name for your list, list-name-parameter appears in the URLs.

The following few sections explain the purpose of each of the above links.

Add some members

Go to

Put your list of addresses in the first large box, or use the nearby gadget to select a file on your computer. Note the options above the box, set to defaults specific to the sample list. You can change them, one-time, for the current submission.

Click "Submit Your Changes" and pay some attention to the resulting page, checking that all address were added successfully.

Remove some members

If you have a complete and accurate list of the exact email addresses you wish to remove, you can use

Put your list of addresses in the first large box, or use the nearby gadget to select a file on your computer. Note the options above the box, set to defaults specific to your list. You can change them, one-time, for the current submission.

Click "Submit Your Changes" and pay some attention to the resulting page, checking that all address were removed successfully.

However, if you have only a few members to remove, it may be easier to simply go to

and select (using the box in the first column (labelled " unsub ") the members you wish for removal. Click "Submit Your Changes" and try to verify your result. For example, you might look at the total number of members near the top of the page to make sure it is what you expect.

Review Membership Status

For just a quick listing of the members, the following is available.

Or, you can view the entire membership of the sample list in more detail at.

Notes:
  1. There is no way to add members on the members list page.
  2. There is no way to change the order the members are listed in.
  3. There is no way to add extra comments about the members.
  4. It is not possible to simply change the email address for a member.
  5. The members list page allows you to make changes to the members' status (perhaps accidentally). An alternate ("safe") way in the web interface to view the same information is to use the roster page.

List Information Page Maintenance

Usually only early in the list creation, you may wish to affect what you see at

For this, see page MailManManagementGuideListinfo?mmlist=list-name-parameter

Getting More Complicated

Perhaps you are interested in doing other configuration of the list.

Archives

You can view options dealing with archiving, including whether-or-not you keep archives at all, on the following page.

Make sure the archive is public only if desired, otherwise ensure it is private.

View your archives at

Tending to Moderator Requests

At least one administrator (or moderator) should periodically check

and attempt to handle any pending requests which might be there.

Quick Note: mailman has the inherent ability to have two levels of privilege: administrator and moderator. It is not clear whether maintaining such distinction is worth the confusion it can cause, but it is a facility worth bearing in mind.

I was actually hoping to find a link to someone else's description to put here. But, in fact, it looks like nearly all tutorials gloss over this job. I thought perhaps I should develop this section by first grabbing some screenshots. However, it would not be possible to parameterize screenshots based on the list name. So, instead, I grabbed some HTML and attempted to represent it inside the following pages.

Here are some links into the resulting attempt

General Options

The designers of mailman provide a page of general options to let you customize your list in various ways.

We discuss those options in...

(Nearly) All Options

The designers of mailman provide many other options to let you customize your list in various ways.

It turned out to be relatively easy to itemize them, and reference the mailman documentation for them itself, in the following page...

Very Complicated; Change Settings In Lots of Lists

Nearly all the links

See Also

Handy Mailman Pages in This CF Twiki

(rendered for sample list)

-- AdrianPepper - 2018-12-14

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Topic revision: r22 - 2020-11-15 - AdrianPepper
 
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