KB 93

How do I restrict posts, moderate, or set up a digest with Majordomo?

Article:93
Created:2001-02-15 19:37:13
Categories:
  E-mail
  Mailing Lists
  Majordomo

Question or Symptom

This is a discussion of some of the common configurations of Majordomo mailing lists.

Resolution

Please be sure you've read and understood knowledge base article 92. We'll assume you know how to send mail to majordomo, how to get your configuration file, and what email aliases have been set up for you mailing list.

Who can subscribe to my mailing list? This is set by the subscribe variable. The options are: auto, open, and closed.

 Auto means anyone can subscribe anyone else to your list. This is usually a
 bad idea.
 Open means anyone can subscribe themselves to the list. If they try to    
 subscribe someone else it must be approved.
 Closed means all subscriptions must be approved. 
 

In addition you can add +confirm to the end of the option to require that the person being subscribed must send a confirmation message before they will be added to the list. This cuts down on subscription pranks that get played on people occasionally.

  By default a list is set up a open+confirm.
 

Who can post to my list?

By default, anyone can post to your list. If you want to limit the subscribers to only be people on your mailing list you can set the restrict-post variable like this:

  restrict-post = my-list-name
 

Majordomo keeps a file with the same name as your list containing all subscribers. In the restrict-post option you're telling Majordomo to use this filename to check whose allowed to post.

You may have a list that is an announcement list that you only want a limited number of people to have posting access to. This can be set up by setting restrict-post to a filename containing only those names. Contact the SWCP staff for help in getting that file located in the correct place.

Setting up a digest

This is something you need to have the SWCP NOC staff do for you. It requires setting up a second majordomo list named my-list-name-digest. It can be subscribed and managed in the same way your other list is. You can have the digest made automatically when it reaches a certain size, or after a certain length of time has passed or you can manually make digests whenever you feel it's time.

Several variables you'll want to be aware of are digest_maxlines, and digest_maxdays.

The way digest_maxdays works is whenever a message comes in for the digest the time since the last digest was made is checked and if it's greater than digest_maxdays a digest will be made. If you want to insure a digest is made once a week you should talk to use about setting up a cron job to issue a manual mkdigest command every seven days. To make a digest manually you'd issue the command

 mkdigest digest-list-password
 

Moderating List

You may want to set up a list where posts must be approved before they are posted to the mailing list. This can be a lot of work for the moderator, but is sometimes appropriate. The option to do this is:

 moderate = yes
 

What will happen when this is set, is each message will be sent to the list owner. The list owner must forward or redirect the message to the mailing adding the following line as the first line of the body of the message:

Approved: list-password

Majordomo will strip the Approved header from the message.

Related KB articles

 KB 13 Restricting posts to a majordomo mailing list

 KB 92 How do I run a Majordomo list?