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Mailing List management

The mailing list system used at Sussex is called Mailman. Almost all mailing list management with Mailman can be done using your web browser.

See the Sussex Mailing Lists home page for administrator and subscriber access to mailing lists.

This document briefly outlines some of the more common tasks that mailing list administrators (or ‘owners’) need to do. See also the Mailman FAQs for some useful tips for common problems.

  1. What happens when you request a new mailing list
  2. Opening your list administrator's web page
  3. The ownership of your mailing list
  4. Changing your list administration password
  5. Adding addresses to your mailing list
  6. Sending email to your mailing list
  7. Removing addresses from your mailing list
  8. Changing maximum message size
  9. Preventing unwanted subscriptions
  10. Displaying your list on the List Info web page
  11. Posting to 'broadcast-only' lists
  12. Archiving options for your list

1. What happens when you request a new mailing list

When you request a new mailing list using the online form provided, staff in IT Services do some checks, and if any problems are apparent with your request you'll be contacted with appropriate advice. Once any problems have been resolved, we will then create the basic infrastructure for your mailing list, its basic configuration, email address and so on according to your request details. We also assign 'ownership' of the list to you and set a password for it. When your new mailing list has been set up, you are sent an email giving appropriate information.

Please note however that IT Services will not normally install email addresses into your mailing list, nor do we accept any responsibility for the maintenance of your mailing lists. Both membership management and mailing list maintenance will be your responsibility as the mailing list's 'owner' (properly, its administrator).

2. Opening your list administrator's web page

When your mailing list is created, you will automatically be sent an email giving you information about your new list, the website to visit for administrative functions, and your password for the mailing list.

You can otherwise find your list's administration page by pointing your web browser at:

https://lists.sussex.ac.uk/mailman/admin/yourlistname

Substitute yourlistname with the lowercase name of your mailing list - for example, supposing you owned a mailing list called filmbuffs, the appropriate address would be:
https://lists.sussex.ac.uk/mailman/admin/filmbuffs

The page will prompt you for your list administrator's password. This is not your personal password, but one used only for your mailing list.
Enter the password in the box and then click the ‘Let Me In’ button (or press Enter) to open the administration page. If you do not remember the password for your list then you will need to ask for a new password. The best way to do this at Sussex is to send a request to IT Services Online Support. The new password will be emailed to the current administrator(s) of your mailing list.

IMPORTANT! Whenever you make any changes to your list (either to its membership or to its options), you must always click the ‘Submit your changes’ button at the bottom of the page, otherwise your changes will be ignored!

Tip: If you own several Mailman mailing lists, you may find it useful to create entries for the list admin pages in your web browser's bookmarks or favourites. That way you can open the appropriate admin page at the click of a mouse button, though you will still of course need to enter the appropriate password.

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3. The ownership of your mailing list

A condition of mailing list ownership on the Sussex Mailman system is that lists must be administered only by Sussex email address holders.

When your mailing list is first set up, your Sussex email address is used to denote you as the administrator (or owner) of the list.  The list owner will receive any emailed notices from the Mailman system concerning the operation of their mailing list.

If you want someone else to be the administrator of one of your lists, you can change this yourself, but you MUST obtain that person's agreement first! Also, you MUST NOT change the administrator address to a non-Sussex address. This is because we have to be reasonably sure that a list is being used for University business rather than by some external organisation, and having it owned by a Sussex account holder provides some assurance of this. IT Services reserves the right to suspend any mailing lists found with non-Sussex administrator addresses, and if necessary will close the mailing list altogether.

We recommend that no more than one or two people act as list administrator, in order to avoid conflicts. You can however nominate another person to act as list moderator - see below.

You can change the administrator (owner) of your mailing list like this:

  1. Open your list admin web page (see section 2).
  2. In the General Options section, click in the box alongside the label 'The list administrator email addresses. Multiple administrator addresses, each on separate line is okay', delete the existing administrator's address if necessary and then enter the email address (just the email address, not the name) of the person who is to be the new administrator.
  3. Click the Submit your changes button at the bottom of the screen to save the new moderator password.

Note that the administrator address is where all notifications and requests for action from the Mailman system will be sent.

Moderators

You can nominate separate moderators for your mailing list, if it is of a type that requires moderation. The primary duty of a moderator is to control postings to a mailing list so that it is not used inappropriately. Moderators should have their own password to a list. Note that the password for the administrator and the moderator is the same when the list is first set up. If no separate moderators are nominated for a mailing list, the list administrator  is automatically treated as a moderator.

You can nominate or change a moderator as follows:

  1. Open your list admin web page (see section 2).
  2. In the General Options section, click in the box alongside the label 'The list moderator email addresses...', then enter the email address (just the email address, not the name) of the person who is to be the new administrator.  If changing a moderator, delete the address that's already shown in the box.  You can add as many moderators as you like, but their addresses must all be one below the other in the box.
  3. Click the Submit your changes button at the bottom of the screen to save the new moderator address(es).

If you nominate a moderator you should set a separate password for them, like this:

  1. Open your list admin web page (see section 2).
  2. In the Passwords section, click in the box alongside the label Enter new moderator password: and enter an appropriate password.
  3. Repeat in the box below it, labelled Confirm moderator password:
  4. Click the ‘Submit your changes’ button at the bottom of the screen to save the new moderator password.

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4. Changing your list administration password

It's a wise precaution to change the administrator password for your list, first of all when the list has been newly created, and also at intervals. The method is described in IT Services FAQ number 1569.

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5. Adding addresses to your mailing list


A note about School/Department staff mailing lists
Note that there are a considerable number of School/Department staff mailing lists which have their memberships maintained automatically on a nightly basis from the University's database.  As such, these lists cannot be maintained manually: although you may be able to manually add a new member address to such a list, that address would almost certainly be removed again during the overnight update process.   Similarly, if you manually remove a member address from such a list, the nightly update is likely to put it back.   To find out more about School/Department mailing lists, please see FAQ 2243.

For standard, manually-maintained mailing lists, you can add any number of addresses as follows:

  1. Open your list admin web page (see section 2).
  2. In the Membership Management section, click Mass Subscription (you’ll use this even if you only want to subscribe one or two members). Wait for the new page to appear.
  3. You’ll see a text box labelled ‘Enter one address per line below...’.  In the text box, enter the official Sussex email address of the individual you would like to add into the text box. This is their address as shown in the Staff Directory or the Student Directory.
  4. When you've finished entering addresses, it's important that you click the Submit your changes button, otherwise the addresses won't be added to your list.

How to enter email addresses

You can enter the addresses by typing them yourself or by pasting them from another copied source.

Enter the addresses, one per line, in this style:

A.N.Other@sussex.ac.uk

or, if the person doesn’t have a ‘friendly’ style Sussex email address, like this, using their username instead:

ano23@sussex.ac.uk

If you would like to add more than one person, enter each address in the box on a separate line (that is, press Enter after typing an address, then type the next address and so on).

You can also enter someone’s name, if known,  together with their email address in angled brackets, like this (remember to add at least one space between the name and the email address):

Real Name   <email address>

For example,

Ann Other   <A.N.Other@sussex.ac.uk>

(NOTE: It’s very important to put the email address in angled brackets, and to add a space after the name, exactly as shown)

You can also copy and paste names and addresses from other sources such as Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. You could have a spreadsheet containing names in one column and the addresses in the next column, provided that the addresses are in the format shown in the image below, which shows part of an Excel spreadsheet with name and addresses in the required format (note how each address is enclosed in diamond brackets), with names in column A and addresses in column B:



and the next image shows these names and addresses pasted into the Mass Subscription box:

You can of course choose just to paste addresses, if you don't want to include names or you don't have them available.

If you would like to send a welcome message to the new members then make sure that the Yes button above the text box is selected. This will send the new members their password and list configuration instructions.


Never forget to click the ‘Submit your changes’ button at the bottom of the screen to add the new addresses to your list.

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6. Sending email to your mailing list

Note that the Mailman list administration pages cannot be used to send email to your mailing list.  Instead, use your normal email application (such as Outlook, OWA, Sussex Webmail etc) and address your message to listname@sussex.ac.uk, where listname is your mailing list's name.  For example, if your list is called filmbuffs, address your email to filmbuffs@sussex.ac.uk.    It's as simple as that.

7. Removing addresses from your mailing list

Before attempting to remove addresses from your list, please see the note about School/Department staff mailing lists in section 5.

You can remove addresses from your mailing list in two ways:

Individual removal

  1. Open your list admin web page (see section 2).
  2. In the Membership Management section, choose Membership List and in that section you’ll see a table showing all the members.  The table is arranged in groups in alphabetical order of address (not names). Find the row of the table with the e-mail address of the individual that you would like to remove.  The first column is labelled ‘unsub’ and contains a box for each member.
  3. Click the ‘unsub’ box by the address that you would like to remove. Repeat this step for any other address you want to remove on that same page.
  4. Click the ‘Submit your changes’ button at the bottom of the page to remove those addresses from your list. You must always click the ‘Submit your changes’ button before selecting a different membership table page.

Mass removal

Another way of removing subscribers from your list is to choose the Mass Removal option, and enter the addresses of those subscribers you want removed from the list.   This is more prone to error, however.

If you added the addresses by copying and pasting from a source such as an Excel spreadsheet, then you can remove the same addresses by pasting exactly the same data into the text box in the Mass Removal section.  Then click Submit your changes button.

If you have a large mailing list and want to remove all members from it but do not have a copyable list of the addresses to hand, please ask the Mailman site administrator at mailman-admin at sussex.ac.uk, who has a special-purpose software tool available to empty mailing lists.

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8. Changing maximum message size

Mailman places a limit on the size of messages that it will deliver to prevent large messages from causing unnecessary disruption. In some cases the default value (40Kb) may not be large enough to allow messages and file attachments* to pass through in a manner suitable for your list's purpose. Follow the steps below to change the limit:

  1. Open your list admin web page (see section 2).
  2. In the General Options section, near the bottom, locate the ‘Maximum length in Kb of a message body’ entry box, near the bottom of the page.  Change the limit to something suitable, or enter 0 if you do not want to set a size limit (the size of messages will still be governed by the settings of the mail server system itself).
  3. Click the ‘Submit your changes’ button at the bottom of the page to put any change into effect.

* Note that it is considered bad practice to send attachments to a mailing list.   It is far better to make an image or document available on a suitable web page and refer the members of your list to the appropriate web address.

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9. Preventing unwanted subscriptions

Mailman allows you to prevent persons from joining your list without explicit approval of the administrator. To activate this feature:

  1. Open your list admin web page (see section 2).
  2. In the Privacy Options section, choose Subscription rules.
  3. Select ‘Require approval’ or ‘Confirm+approval’.
  4. Click the ‘Submit your changes’ button at the bottom of the screen.

Future subscription requests will cause Mailman to send you an e-mail message telling you that someone has tried to join your list. Go to the URL in the message and then use the on-screen form to accept or reject their request.

To ban any subscriptions that do not come from a Sussex (sussex.ac.uk) email address, enter the following ‘regular expression’ in the ‘List of addresses which are banned from membership in this mailing list (ban_list)’ field, exactly as shown:

^.+@(?!sussex\.ac\.uk$)

CAUTION:You may want to consider the value of using regular expressions to allow or deny user action. While it may be very useful to have some of the subscribing and moderating automated, the regular expression may not have the desired behaviour. If you require approval of all subscriptions, whether or not you are using a ‘regular expression’ as above, you will know exactly what is happening with your list.

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10. Displaying your list on the List Info web page

As standard, 'private' and 'private broadcast' mailing list names are not shown on the openly-viewable Sussex List Info page. You can, however, choose whether or not to have your list name displayed, whether or not it was set up as a private list. To do this, follow the instructions below.

  1. Open your list admin web page (see section 2).
  2. In the Privacy Options section, if you want your list name to be shown on the List Info page, select Yes against the “Advertise this list when people ask what lists are on this machine?” item (the first on the page). If you don't want it shown, select No instead.
  3. Click the ‘Submit your changes’ button to save your choice of options.

If you want to prevent anyone but your list members seeing who belongs to your list, select ‘List members’ against the ‘Who can view subscription list?’ item (near the bottom of the same page), or (to prevent members from seeing who else is in the list) select ‘List admin only’.

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11. Posting to 'broadcast-only' lists

Certain configurations of mailing list allow for 'broadcast' only; that is, the membership cannot post to the list. This is done by automatically 'moderating' each list member. Before you as owner can post to the list, you will need either to subscribe yourself as a member and then 'unmoderate' yourself in the membership list, or add yourself as a 'non-member who can post'.

To subscribe yourself and then unmoderate yourself, do this:

  1. Open your list admin web page (see section 2).
  2. Select the Membership Management page.
  3. Select Mass Subscription.
  4. Enter your address in the box and then click the ‘Submit your changes’ button.
  5. Select the Membership Management page again.
  6. Locate your address in the membership list.
  7. Click the box in the mod column (this is the column immediately to the right of your address) to switch off moderation for you.
  8. Click the ‘Submit your changes’ button to save this setting.

To add yourself as a 'non-member who can post', do this:

  1. Open your list admin web page (see section 2).
  2. Select the Privacy Options page.
  3. Select Sender Filters.
  4. Scroll down the page until you find the text box labelled List of non-member addresses whose postings should be automatically accepted (this is about halfway down the page).
  5. Enter your official Sussex email address (exactly the same address used to indicate you as list administrator) in the box.
  6. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the ‘Submit your changes’ button to save this setting.

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12. Archiving options for your list

You can choose whether or not the postings to your list will be archived, whether they will public or private, and how often new archives will be created. As standard, new lists will be set up such that archives will not be kept unless you request them.

To visit your archiving options, do the following:

  1. Open your list admin web page (see section 2).
  2. Select the Archiving Options page.
  3. To determine whether or not archives are kept at all, select Yes or No against the 'Archive Messages?' option.
  4. To determine whether the list archive is to be public or private, select as appropriate against the 'Is archive file source for public or private archival?' option. Remember that public archives can be read by anyone using the web, but private archives can only be read by list members.
    We STRONGLY recommend using the private archive option.
  5. To determine how often a new archive is to be started, select Yearly, Monthly, Quarterly, Weekly or Daily against the 'How often should a new archive volume be started?' option.
    We recommend that you use Monthly archiving.
  6. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the ‘Submit your changes’ button to save this setting.

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created on 2010-01-01 by Andy Clews
last updated on 2014-08-07 by Andy Clews