Access to List Archives
By default, the messages sent through a list are visible in the Discussion Forum
Interface to both members and visitors. To restrict visibility of these archives, change the settings in Utilities: List Settings: Discussion Forum Interface: Message Reading:
List Visibility .
Note that if you do not require your members to have passwords, then non-members may be able to get their way into your mailing list and read the archives if they know just the email address of a member on your list.
If this concerns you, you can set your mailing list to require member passwords . List members can have a link to reset their password emailed to them by going to the
Discussion Forum Interface . If they fail to log in on the My Forums tab, they will have the opportunity to have a link to reset the password emailed to them.
List admins can have a link to reset their password emailed to them if they fail to log into the admin interface .
Custom Web Interface
The web interface is written in Tcl and the complete source code is included. You are welcome to change the web interface to suit your needs. No royalties are paid to us and no permission need be requested of us in order to do this. Some people write just a few pages for subscribing and unsubscribing, and do not show their "public" users that the
ListManager web interface even exists.
Subscription Security
Who May Join?
By default, ListManager lists are "open", meaning no administrator needs to approve a member. You may make individual lists private, closed, or password protected in
Utilities: List Settings: New Subscriber Policy: Security .
Furthermore, you may wish to restrict your mailing list to only allow subscription requests performed using the web interface. For instance, you could put your web interface on an Internal-access only web server, so that outsiders cannot get to it. This would allow you to have an "open" mailing list, where people in your company could join by getting to the web interface form, but outsiders could not. Subscription options may be selected in Utilities: List Settings: New Subscriber Policy .
ListManager also supports explicit banning of members, and the "reverse banning". The ban member feature would allow you, for instance, to ban someone who was an employee of a competing company from joining your mailing list.
Reverse banning is a setting which allows you to ban everyone except those that match your pattern. An excellent use of this feature is to have a corporate mailing list that is
Lyris, Inc. | 6401 Hollis Street, Suite 125 | Emeryville CA 94608 USA |
www.lyris.com
Toll free +1.800.768.2929 | International calls +1.510.844.1600å | Fax +1.510.844.1598
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open, so that anyone in your company can join easily and automatically, but that nobody from the outside can join. To do this, you would tell ListManager to ban all addresses not having your corporate domain name on their email address, for example
"acme.com".
Private Lists
A private mailing list is one where only people who a list administrator as personally approved are allowed to join the mailing list.
With a private mailing list, people can request to join the mailing list, by filling out the
Join web page or sending in an email request. With a private list, people who request to join are not enabled until the list administrator approves them. Whenever someone requests to join, the list administrator(s) can receive notification of the join request, and approve or reject them.
To create a Private mailing list, create a mailing list as you normally would, using the
Create Mailing List web page. Then, in Utilities: List Settings: New Subscriber Policy:
Security , select Private.
After you have created your list, you will want to create a member who is a list administrator, and who receives the email notifications of the join requests. Go to
Utilities: Administration: Administrators: List Admins to create additional list administrators.
Now, whenever someone asks to join the mailing list, you will receive an email notification of their request. You will then be able to approve or reject them with an email command, and the notification message will tell you which commands to send back to approve or reject the person.
Confirmed Subscriptions
ListManager can send a "confirmation request" when a person asks to subscribe to a mailing list. The confirmation request message is sent to the email address that was subscribed. The person must receive this confirmation request message, and reply to it, in order for the membership to be activated. With a confirmed subscription, ListManager has proven that the email address given to it is indeed the email address of the person who requested the subscription.
Confirmed subscriptions prevent two problems:
1. People sometimes join a mailing list under a fake email address, in order to post harassing or otherwise inappropriate messages to the mailing list. With a confirmed subscription, people must use an email address that they can receive email at, which provides a "paper trail" that points back to a real person.
Lyris, Inc. | 6401 Hollis Street, Suite 125 | Emeryville CA 94608 USA |
www.lyris.com
Toll free +1.800.768.2929 | International calls +1.510.844.1600å | Fax +1.510.844.1598
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2. In order to harass other people, some malicious people will subscribe the other person to mailing lists that the person never asked to be signed up to. If enough mailing lists are involved, the person may receive a huge amount of email and this can be a real inconvenience to them. This is especially a problem when a web form is used to subscribe people, as it is very easy to enter someone else's email address in that form. Confirmed subscription solve this problem, because the person being abused gets the confirmation request, and does not confirm, so that they membership is never activated.
You may configure subscription confirmations in Utilities: List Settings: New Subscriber
Policy: Confirmation .
Unsubscribing
There are many ways to unsubscribe from a ListManager mailing list:
Log into the discussion forum interface , select My Forums, and click "unsubscribe" next to a list.
Send the command "unsubscribe listname" to [email protected].
Send the command "unsubscribe listname your-email-address" to [email protected].
Forward any posting you receive from a mailing list to the [email protected] address.
Click on an unsubscribe link provided in an email message.
If an unsubscribe request is made with the "unsubscribe" command sent to [email protected], as in "unsubscribe jazztalk", then the person named in the From: field is unsubscribed. If the email address named in the
From: field is not a member, ListManager returns a message to that person saying that they could not be unsubscribed.
ListManager also provides the option of naming an email address on the "unsubscribe" command line, such as the command "unsubscribe jazztalk [email protected]". In such a case, if unsubscribe confirmation are enabled for the list, then a confirmation message is sent to the subscriber, then ensure that they are same person and not that someone else is trying to unsubscribe them.
When mail is received at the "unsubscribe-listname@…" address, ListManager tries to determine who the subscriber is and automatically removes them. In most situations, this works very well.
The ListManager unsubscribing logic for unsubscribe requests received at the
"unsubscribe-listname@…" is fairly sophisticated, and here is how it works. When
ListManager receives a message to the "unsubscribe-listname@…" address,
ListManager goes through the following steps:
Lyris, Inc. | 6401 Hollis Street, Suite 125 | Emeryville CA 94608 USA |
www.lyris.com
Toll free +1.800.768.2929 | International calls +1.510.844.1600å | Fax +1.510.844.1598
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