Managing Moderated Mailing Lists
From CFAES Help Documentation and FAQs Project
Contents |
About Moderated Mailing Lists
Moderated lists require permission or approval by the list "owner" to subscribe or post to a mailing list. Enabling this feature helps to control lists by ensuring messages posted to a list comply with the list's objective. This could mean preventing spam and inappropriate topics from being posted.
Moderating subscriptions helps keep spammer and spammer-harvested email addresses off the list. By allowing anyone to subscribe to a mailing list, with-out approval by the list owner, spammers are able to subscribe themselves and email addresses of those they wish to spam even if the list is configure to allow only subscribers to post. This can lead to repercussions such as email getting blocked by other mail services because they believe we host spammers.
By ensuring that the CFAES Messaging System mailing lists are properly maintained, we can, in some part, help minimize spam coming into our and other mailboxes.
Moderated Mailing Lists on the CFAES Messaging System
Moderated mailing lists require a little maintenance to keep posts and subscriptions up to date.
Special Mailing List Folders
When a list is created, several mailboxes appear in the list owner's account. listname will be the name of your list and is the first part proceeding the @ of the mailing list address given to you when the list was created:
- listname
- this mailbox is the mailing list archive: it contains the messages posted to the mailing list
- listname/requests
- this mailbox contains subscription and other requests
- listname/reports
- this mailbox contains bounces and other DSN (Delivery Status Notification) messages generated for the messages distributed via this mailing list.
- listname/approval
- this mailbox contains postings that require the list owner approval (moderated postings).
Mailing List Addresses
There are special email addresses associated with your mailing list. Your main mailing list address will be given to you when the list has been created a CFAES Messaging System administrator. It will look something like listname@domain.edu. The domain.edu portion will be any of the domains hosted on the CFAES Messaging System, but will usually be ag.ohio-state.edu. This address will be the basis of the other special addresses.
- listname@domain.edu
- This is the main address used to request the message be posted to the list.
- listname-on@domain.edu
- Sending any email to this address requests your email address be subscribed to the list.
- listname-off@domain.edu
- Sending any email to this address unsubscribes your email address automatically. The list owner does not need to approve this request.
Mailing List Actions
Posting
When a message is sent to be posted to a mailing list, through the listname@domain.edu email address, it is delivered to the approval folder and waits for the list owner to approve the message for posting.
Subscribing
When a subscription request is sent to a list, through the listname-on@domain.edu email address, it is delivered to the requests folder and waits for the list owner to approve the subscription.
Unsubscribing
When an unsubscribe request is sent to a list, through the listname-off@domain.edu email address, the address of the sender is automatically unsubscribed from the list.
List Owner Administration Responsibilities for Moderated Lists
Logging in to the List's "owner" account
When you have a mailing list created for you, the list is assigned to an "owner" account. This owner account can be your own email account, but will more likely be a special owner-listname@domain.edu account made specifically for your list or group of lists.
To access many of the special features of your mailing list, you'll need to log in to the owner account through the CFAES Messaging System web interface. You can access the web interface at http://webmail.cfaes.ohio-state.edu using any web browser, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari.
While the web interface supports a number of different looks (or layouts), for the sake of this article, we'll be using the default, or ***, layout.
Begin by opening your web browser and open the http://webmail.cfaes.ohio-state.edu web page (it's a good idea to bookmark this web page for when you need it later).
- From the selection box drop-down labeled Layout, select ***. This is also called the "default" layout. It's not pretty, but it gets the job done.
- Enter your owner account name, in full, in the Login name text area. This needs to be owner-listname@domain.edu not just owner-listname.
- Enter your owner account password in the Password test area.
- Now click on the Enter button to access the account
In the following examples, the list has been named osue1123-mylist. Once you are logged in, click on the Folders link to go to the Folder view. You should see the special mailing list mailbox folders in this view.
Clicking on a folder link, such as osue123-mylist/requests, will open the message list for that folder.
Clicking on the (LIST) link will open the mailing list settings page to manually manage subscriptions access the advanced configuration of your mailing list. The advanced configuration page is discussed in Advanced Mailing List Management.
Processing a Subscribe request
When someone sends a subscription request to your list, you will need to act on it before they're subscribed to the list. Subscription requests are held in the listname/requests folder. The easiest way to subscribe someone is to simply redirect the message to the listname-on@domain.edu address.
- In the listname/requests message list view, select the subscription request message by clicking on the white box to the left of the message. This will add a check-mark in the box. You can select as many messages you need to.
- Now type listname-on@domain.edu in the text area below the Redirect to... button at the bottom right of the message list.
- Click the Redirect to... button. This will process the subscription request on behalf of you, the list owner.
- NOTE: You can also subscribe an email address from any message wherever there's a Redirect To... button and text box in your mailing list owner account. Just redirect any message to the listname-on@ domain.edu address.
There are three things that happen at this point.
- The email address in the From: header of the subscription request email is added to the subscription list and marked as "pending". If a real name is also given in the From: header, that will be added as well.
- A second copy of the subscription request will appear in the listname/requests folder. You don't need either of these at this point, but if you want to keep record, you can safely delete one (usually the newest one).
- A confirmation of the subscription request is sent to the email address that was just subscribed. This message must be replied to before the subscription is finalized. Once the person requesting the subscription receives this confirmation notice, they only need to click their email clients "Reply" button and then click the "Send" button.
Once the person requesting the subscription replies to the confirmation, the status for their address in the subscription list will change from "pending" to (usually) "feed" or some other active subscriber status.
Manually Adding a Subscription
You can also manually add an email address to the subscription list without a subscription request or to skip the confirmation process. This is done on the Subscribers page.
In the folder view, or the page with the list of mailbox folders, Click the (LIST) link to the right of the listname folder link. Now click the Subscription link near the top-right. This will open the list of subscribers to your list.
To add a new subscriber, just enter an email address in the text box labeled Single Address: and click the Subscribe button.
To include the subscriber's full name -- to make list management easier later on -- use the following format when entering the single address:
"Real Name" <EmailName@Email.Address>
You'll notice there's another text field and Browse button just below the Single Address: field labeled Import. This is used to import a list of multiple addresses to subscribe many people at once. More on this is found in the Advanced Mailing List Management article.
Moderating Posts to Your List
When a message is being sent to be posted to the list, it will be go into the listname/approval mailbox until you process it.
To process the new message, first decide if it should be posted to the list. If the message should be posted, select the message by clicking in the small white box to the left of the message and click on the Approve button at he bottom of the page. This posts the message to the list.
When the message is posted to the list, it will also appear in the listname folder. At this point you can safely delete the message in both the listname and listname/approval folders, or keep one or both for your records.
Quick Steps
Moderating New Subscribers
- Login to the CommuniGate Pro server using the default login layout
- Open the listname/request folder
- Select the subscription request message
- Redirect the message to listname-on@domain.edu
Moderating Your List
- Login to the CommuniGate Pro server using the default login layout
- Open the listname/approval mailbox
- Select the messages that should be posted
- Click Approve
