Adrian Pepper's Quick-Start Guide to Mailman List Moderation, Instructions

Detailed instructions for the administrative database

The administrative requests are displayed in one of two ways, on a summary page, and on a details page. The summary page contains pending subscription and unsubscription requests, as well as postings being held for your approval, grouped by sender email address. The details page contains a more detailed view of each held message, including the all the message's headers and an excerpt of the message body.

On all the pages, the following actions are available:

• Defer -- Defer your decision until later. No action is taken now for this pending administrative request, but for held postings, you can still forward or preserve the message (see below).

• Approve -- Approve the message, sending it on to the list. For membership requests, approve the change in membership status.

• Reject -- Reject the message, sending a rejection notice to the sender, and discarding the original message. For membership requests, reject the change in membership status. In either case, you should add a reason for the rejection in the accompanying text box.

• Discard -- Throw away the original message, without sending a rejection notice. For membership requests, this simply discards the request without notice to the person making the request. This is usually the action you want to take for known spam.

For held messages, turn on the Preserve option if you want to save a copy of the message for the site administrator. This is useful for abusive messages that you want to discard, but need to keep a record of for later inspection.

Turn on the Forward to option, and fill in the forwarding address if you want to forward the message to someone else not on the list. To edit a held message before it is sent on to the list, you should forward the message to yourself (or the list owners), and discard the original message. Then, when the message shows up in your mailbox, make your edits and resend the message to the list, including an Approved: header with the list password as its value. It is proper netiquette in this case to include a note in the resent message, explaining that you have modified the text.

If the sender is a list member who is being moderated, you can optionally clear their moderation flag. This is useful when your list is configured to put new members on probation, and you've decided that this member can be trusted to post to the list without approval.

If the sender is not a list member, you can add the email address to a sender filter. Sender filters are described on the sender filter privacy page, and may be one of auto-accept (Accepts), auto-hold (Holds), auto-reject (Rejects), or auto-discard (Discards). This option will not be available if the address is already on one of the sender filters.

When you're finished, click on the Submit All Data button at the top or bottom of the page. This button will submit all selected actions for all administrative requests that you've made a decision for.

Return to the summary page.

list-name-parameter list run by list-name-parameter-owner at lists.uwaterloo.ca
list-name-parameter administrative interface (requires authorization)
Overview of all lists.uwaterloo.ca mailing lists

version 2.1.12