Mailing list administration

The IT Service Center operates a central server for managing mailing lists, which is based on the "Mailman" server software. In this article you will find all the important information for operators and administrators when using Mailman. One of the major advantages of Mailman is the user-friendly configuration via web interface, which replaces the configuration via mail, which is no longer considered up-to-date.

When configuring mailing lists, a distinction can be made between the following types:

• Newsletter
• Internal discussion list
• External discussion list

A newsletter is characterized by the fact that e-mails are sent from one or a few e-mail addresses to a large group of recipients. A discussion about the topics of these mails does not take place on the mailing list. In general, the group of recipients of these mails is not restricted.

Discussion lists, on the other hand, are used to discuss the topic of the mailing list in question. The two types of discussion lists differ in the group of recipients: external lists are open to everyone, internal lists are restricted to a specific group of recipients. The same applies to the possibly existing archive of the list in question: The archive of an internal discussion list is only accessible to subscribers to the list in question; in the case of an external discussion list, it may be useful to make it accessible to non-subscribers as well (e.g. so that posts to the list can be found via search engines).

For data protection reasons, the subscriber list of all mailing list types should only be accessible to the list administrator. In certain cases, however, it makes sense to open this list to all list members.

You should use "Confirmation by the user" if you do not want to restrict the user group of your newsletter from the outset. The user is simply asked to click on a link sent to them by email to confirm their subscription request. This serves to check whether the e-mail address provided is valid and belongs to the user. You should use "Confirmation and approval" if you only want to allow certain users to subscribe to your newsletter. As described above, the user must confirm their e-mail address by clicking on a link sent to them by e-mail, after which you as the administrator or moderator of the list will receive a message by e-mail that a new subscription request is awaiting your decision. You can decide on the request via the link provided after entering the administrator or moderator password.

If your list is a mailing list that should be subscribed to by as many users as possible, it is advisable to check "Yes" in the field above ("Also make this list known when people ask which lists are available on this machine"). Among other things, this causes the mailing list to be noted on the http://lists.its.uni-kassel.de/mailman/listinfo page.

You should also set who should have access to the subscriber list. To protect the privacy of the subscribers, "Only the list administrator" should always be selected here:

Only a few users should be able to subscribe to an internal discussion list. For this reason, the item "What do I have to do to subscribe to a mailing list?" on the page "Subscription rules and address filter" -> "Subscription rules" must be set to "Confirmation and approval". This is the only way to ensure that the user has entered a valid e-mail address ("Confirmation" of the address by the user) and that they belong to the intended group of recipients of the internal discussion list ("Approval" by the list administrator):

Whether the parameter "Also make this list known when people ask which lists are available on this machine?" should be set to "Yes" or "No" depends on the individual case. Among other things, this setting causes the mailing list to be noted on the http://lists.its.uni-kassel.de/mailman/listinfo page.

Here you set "Archive messages?" to "Yes". You should definitely leave the setting "Are the archive files for a private or public archive?" set to "Private", as otherwise the posts on your internal list would be publicly accessible and could also be found via search engines such as Google.

Finally, on the "General options" page, you should change the setting "To which address should replies to list messages be sent?" to "This list". Otherwise, it will be difficult to have a discussion, because in the default setting all replies to mails via the mailing list are only sent to the sender of the mail (and not to the other list members).

For an external discussion list, you can use the settings for the internal discussion list from above. You only have the useful option of setting a public archive for archiving.

If you want to create an archive of this mailing list (a collection of all mails about the mailing list accessible via the web browser), you can set this on the "Archiving options" page:
Here you set "Archive messages?" to "Yes". You can either leave the setting "Are the archive files for a private or public archive?" on "Private" (then only subscribers to your list can access the archive) or change it to "Public". The archive is then also open to non-subscribers and search engines such as Google, which can be interesting for some mailing lists on general topics or, for example, a support mailing list for a software program. In this case, however, you should set the setting "Hide the sender of a message by replacing it with the mailing list address" to "Yes" under the menu item "General options". This prevents spammers from being able to read the sender addresses of individual mails from your mailing list archive.

You can also enter your users yourself (or ask them to enter themselves). If you want to do this, please make sure beforehand that all addresses are correct and that all users agree to an entry in your list. You can then enter the e-mail addresses of your users under the menu item "Member administration..." -> "Add/Subscribe" to your mailing list (insert one address per line in the text field, don't forget to "Save changes"):

You also have the option here of only inviting users instead of adding them to your list straight away. You should use this option if you are not sure whether the users agree to an entry on your list. You can also specify here whether the users should receive an automatic welcome message (the default setting is Yes, as the users also receive their password with this email, which they can use to make changes to their email address themselves, for example) and whether you as the list owner want to receive a success message by email for each email address entered.