Managing mailing-lists with Mailman

About Mailman

Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman is integrated with the web, making it easy for users to manage their accounts and for list owners to administer their lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more.

This page will present only the functions specific to AlternC. For more information about Mailman, visit http://list.org/.

How to create a new mailing-list

In the main AlternC navigation menu, click on the menu item "Mailing lists". It will display the following screen in the right side of the screen:

If there are no existing lists, it will display the message "No list defined yet".

Click on the link "Create a list"

• enter the name of the list before the "@" part of the e-mail address. If you have many domain names associated with your account, specify to which domain the list belongs to. Warning: on most servers, Mailman cannot create two lists with the same name, even if they have different domains. However, most large hosting providers apply a patch to go around this issue.

• enter the e-mail address of the "owner" of the list. This is the person who will have all the administrative rights to the list. Also, the person will get a notification by e-mail that the new list has been created, including administrative information, such as the password.

• enter the administrative password (for both administration and moderation, this may be changed later). Note that the password will be displayed on the screen in clear text.

• when you are ready, click on the button "create the list".

You will then be sent back to the list of available mailing-lists. Here is the result:

To add subscribers to the list, change its description, configure the moderation options, etc. click on "list admin".