CHAPTER FOUR - MAJORDOMO
ClubCt.Com LLC offers customers the ability to manage their own list servers. These list servers are maintained with E-Mail - that is, you send commands to the list servers within E-Mail messages. In general, messages should be sent in the body of the message, not in the subject. But this customized listserver handles both ways.
WHAT IS MAJORDOMO?
Majordomo is a program which automates the management of Internet mailing lists. Commands are sent to Majordomo via electronic mail to handle all aspects of list maintenance. Once a list is set up, virtually all operations can be performed remotely, requiring no intervention upon the postmaster of the list site.
_ majordomo - n: a person who speaks, makes arrangements, or takes charge for another. From latin "major domus" - "master of the house".
Majordomo controls a list of addresses for some mail transport system (like sendmail or smail) to handle. Majordomo itself performs no mail delivery (though it has scripts to format and archive messages).
Here's a short list of some of the features of Majordomo:
To create a new list, visit the Members Support page, and complete the appropriate form. Make sure the list has a different name than your userid. For the purposes of this manual, suppose you gave your list the wonderfully inventive name your-list.
To subscribe, send the message
subscribe your-list
to majordomo@clubct.com. Majordomo will then contact the owner of the list (you) for approval to add the subscriber to the list. You must reply with the correct password for that list.
To unsubscribe, send the message
unsubscribe your-list
Messages sent to your-list@yourdomain.com will be posted to the entire list. When a message is sent to your list, Majordomo will contact the owner of the list (you) for approval to send the message to subscribers to the list. You must reply with the correct password for that list.
approve pswd subscribe your-list new-subscriber@somewhere.com
This will subscribe yourself to the list or anyone else you wished. Pswd is your password. Try this out since we haven't yet subscribed you to your own list.
approve pswd unsubscribe your-list former-subscriber@somewhere.com
This unsubscribes the person whose e-mail address is given.
To create digests, ask us to activate the digest feature for your list.
How do I control how often they are created?
You could use cron to create periodic digest with a command like the following:
echo mkdigest [digest-name] [digest-password] | mail majordomo@...
This will force a digest to be created. Or you can set the max size in the digest list config file down low, and force automatic generation.
This would mean that you would be changing the text:
maxlength = 40000
in the list configuration for the digest. (Send
config your-list pswd
to majordomo to get the configuration which you can edit and send back. This is the same procedure as mentioned in 4.2.5.)
You can combine the two methods, for example to send out at least one digest per day but more if that one would be over a certain size.
Send to listproc or majordomo:
newinfo your-list pswd Blah, blah, blah.
This will add a welcome to the message everyone sees when they subscribe. It will also be used if a customer requests info on a list. Note the blank line between the newinfo command and Blah, blah, blah. Also note that you can not include any other commands with this command. Of course, the info message can be many lines.
passwd your-list old-password new-password
Will change your master password from the old-password to the new-password.
approve pswd who your-list
Posting a message with the following text at the beginning will work. Note that htere should be NO blank line before Approved : password.
To: oceania-l@oceania.org Subject: Oceania Oracle - June Milestone Approved: password
Message begins here. (Note the blank space -- the first blank line in the message.)
Send the command config your-list pswd to get a copy of your self-documenting configuration file.
You will find the area that contains the reply-to field.
Update this field and then send the command newconfig your-list pswd followed
by your new configuration file.