This is a supplement to the Owner's Manual for mail-list.com. It contains advanced instructions for operating your announcement mailing list.
Public Addresses:
Subscriber On
Subscriber Vacation
List Owner Address
Secret Addresses:
List Administration
Advanced Commands
Posting Messages
Auto-responders at mail-list.com
Subscriber On: via list owner approval
Sometimes, a listowner may want the power to control whether people
are allowed to join the list. An optional feature is the ability to
approve each subscriber before they are added to your list. You will
find that option on the web page at
http://db.mail-list.com/list_search.html. The option is labeled -
Approve Each Subscriber: (for private lists), and you will want to
toggle the radio button to Approve Each Subscriber.
If you have selected this feature on our web page, when someone sends an email to:
they will receive your Acknowledgment message. Note that you can customize the contents of this Acknowledgment Message, which is located on the web site, immediately following the Approve Each Subscriber option.
You, the listowner, will receive the following email:
Subject: Simon-sez: please open_sesame subscribe joe@domain.com
From: yourlist-request@mail-list.com
If you want to allow that person to subscribe, you must hit "Reply" to this email. Your Reply email will look like this:
To: yourlist-request@mail-list.com
From: your_email@address.com
Subject: Re: Simon-sez: please open_sesame subscribe joe@domain.com
When your "Reply" is received by our computers, the subscriber will be added to the list and sent your Welcome message.
When you use the Approve Each Subscriber option, your subscriber will receive two emails from mail-list.com an Acknowledgment email immediately, and your Welcome email when you "Reply" to the Simon-Sez command we send you.
If you have any list qualifications or rules, you may want to put them into your Acknowledgment email. Some mail lists will not approve a subscriber until they have read and replied to the Acknowledgment email. The Acknowledgement message will be set up to allow the new subscriber to reply back to you.
If you have selected this option on the web page -
Send reports and messages to all moderators: Yes
Then yourlist-list-owner@mail-list.com will be in the From line of the Acknowledgement message that is sent to the new subscriber.
Otherwise the From line on the Acknowledgement message will be your_email@address.com.
It is possible to combine the double opt-in procedures with the list owner approval method. That is, you can have all requests to join your list reply to the confirmation message first.
When they reply, the list moderators will then receive the Simon-Sez email. Only when the list moderator replies will the new subscriber be added to your list.
This option can be useful if your yourlist-on@mail-list.com
address gets a lot of spam. This feature is not an option on the web
page, so please email sales@mail-list.com if you
would like to enable this option.
You may be interested in telling your subscribers about this address:
yourlist-vacation@mail-list.com
This address allows your subscriber to temporarily suspend mail delivery from the list. It is useful since it does not make people go through the double opt-in process when they want to resume delivery. You can update the footer that is added to each message, should you decide to use this option.
Your subscriber sends an email to that address to suspend mail delivery. Your subscriber sends an email to that address again, to resume mail delivery
When an email is sent to this address, it will go to the listowner and to each list moderator (if you have any):
yourlist-list-owner@mail-list.com
If you want to receive email related to your list, but do not want to publish your personal email address, use the List Owner Address. You can also put the List Owner Address in the "From Address Override" field on the web page. To do this, visit http://db.mail-list.com/list_search.html.
The "From Address Override" option will insert that address into the From line of each message you send to the list. So you can send in the email from your_email@address.com, and have it appear to have come from a different address.
The optional field on the web page - Send reports and messages to all moderators: allows you to control whether your additional list moderators will also receive these messages.
The List Administration address allows you to manage the list of subscribers and request reports by sending in email messages to this address, with the proper commands placed in the body of the email.
When you send in your list administration commands, your email must be sent From one of these address(es):
List Administration requires a password placed in the Subject line, for your list it is:
open_sesame
In summary, your email headers should look like this:
To: yourlist-moderator@mail-list.com From: your_email@address.com Subject: open_sesame
You will place the commands in the body of the email. Put only one command per line.
You may put as many commands as you want into the body of the email. Each command will be executed separately.
The complete list of commands is listed in a separate document called "Index of Announcement List Commands".
Listed below are the Advanced commands. See the Owner's Manual for the Basic commands. (remember that Joe and Sue's addresses are examples, and not part of the command).
--
To remove someone from your list without sending them a goodbye
message.
bootoff joe@domain.com
--
To change the email address of a subscriber.
changeaddress joe@old-address.com joe@new-address.com
It does not matter which order the two addresses are in. One address should currently be on your list, and the other one should not.
--
To add an email address to your reject list. This will keep that
email address from ever getting on your list. Any attempts by this
email address to subscribe will be silently discarded by
mail-list.com.
addreject sue@domain.com
You can also add a domain name to your reject list, thereby blocking any email address at that domain name from getting on your list.
addreject xyz.com
--
To remove an email address from your reject list, thus allowing them
to join your list.
delreject sue@domain.com
Likewise, you can remove a domain name from your reject list.
delreject xyz.com
--
To see the email addresses and domain names on your reject list.
showreject
Addresses on your reject list are not allowed on your mailing list. Your reject list starts out empty.
--
To add an email address to your vacation list.
addvacation joe@domain.com
The addvacation command removes the subscriber's email address from your distribution list, and puts it on the vacation list. This will stop new messages going to them until either the subscriber sends in a message to yourlist-vacation@mail-list.com , or you send in a delvacation command.
--
To remove an email address from your vacation list.
delvacation mike@domain.com
The delvacation command will remove the subscriber's email address from the vacation list, and move it to the distribution list. This will cause future messages to your list to be sent to them.
Remember that your subscribers can activate and deactivate with one quick email! Please see Subscriber Vacation in the Public Addresses section for complete details.
--
To see the list of people on vacation, and not currently receiving
messages posted to the list.
showvacation
--
To receive your list back as a text attachment.
attachlist
--
To see the list of new subscribers.
showsub
New subscribers are those that have replied to your confirmation message since the last time your Summary Statistics Report was run. Which will be either daily or weekly, based on the setting of
Summary Statistics Report
at http://db.mail-list.com/list_search.html.
--
To see the list of people that have recently unsubscribed by their own
request.
showunsub
This report will only show the unsbscribe addresses from the past day or the past week, based on your settings of the Summary Statistics Report.
--
To see the list of email addresses removed from your list for
excessive bounces.
showbounce
This report will only show the bounced email addresses from the past day or the past week, based on your settings of the Summary Statistics Report.
--
To see the number and email address that have not responded to the
request for confirmation. This report will be in date order, with the
oldest email address at the top.
showcookie
Sometimes your yourlist-on@mail-list.com address will get on the bulk email lists, and will then start to receive spam. Our system will send back the confirmation message, but the spammers will rarely reply. If this happens you will notice a lot of strange email addresses on this report.
--
To receive the domain name category report of your list.
showdomain
This report shows you the most frequently occurring domain names on your list and the percentage of subscribers that are at each of the top domains.
--
To see the DNS Mail Exchange (MX) information used to deliver email to
a given email address.
showdns marc@domain.com
This command will query the domain name system, to see how email is to be delivered for that domain name.
--
To verify that your message has been delivered to a particular
subscriber. This command will return the mail delivery logs for that
email address for the past few days.
querysent sue@domain.com
If a subscriber complains about not receiving your message, run a checklist command first to make sure they are on your list. If so, then run the querysent command to see the logs of our delivery attempts.
--
To put your list into alphabetical order by domain name, and also
remove any duplicate and/or illegal email addresses.
sortlist
--
In summary, your email would look like this, if you were doing several
of the above commands.
In the address field:
To: yourlist-moderator@mail-list.com
From: your_email@address.com
Subject: open_sesame
And in the body of the email:
bootoff charlie@domain.com
changeaddress mike@old-address.com mike@new-address.com
showsub
showunsub
querysent sue@domain.com
sortlist
addvacation joe@domain.com
etc
For those commands that require an email address (like subscribe, unsubscribe, etc), you can list the command one time, followed by many addresses, one email address per line.
For example,
To: yourlist-moderator@mail-list.com
From: your_email@address.com
Subject: open_sesame
subscribe
charlie@domain.com
sue@domain.com
joe@domain.com
sam@domain.com
unsubscribe
ellen@domain.com
harry@domain.com
mike@domain.com
It is important to put the Posting Messages address
in the BCC field, as this is what actually sends your message out to the list. mail-list.com will check to see that your message is from one of these approved email addresses:
Since somebody could spoof your email address, and send email pretending to be you, you will want to keep the Posting Messages address confidential.
Confirmation Posting Message: If you want to proofread your message
or need more security when posting a message to your list, please
select the following option at
http://db.mail-list.com/list_search.html
Approve Each Message: (send, receive back, proofread, release)
If you have chosen this feature, you will still Post your messages, as usual. Then each listowner and moderator will receive a "confirmation email". When one of you hits "Reply" to the confirmation email, the original message will be released to the list. Our computers will only send out the message once, so if two or three of you hit Reply, it does not matter. The first Reply is the winner.
You can open the body of this confirmation email to see the exact text of the message sent. You cannot make changes at this point! If you do NOT want to send this message, do not Reply. Just start over and make a new message.
After hitting Reply, the confirmation email you receive will look like this:
From: your_email@address.com
To: yourlist-control@<<sub_domain>>.mail-list.com
Subject: Re: [yourlist] COMMAND APPROVE 123456789
Send this message back to our machine, and the Subject line will release your original message. It does not matter what is in the body of this COMMAND APPROVE message.
Auto-responders at mail-list.com
An auto-responder is a special email address that returns an email when it receives an email, automatically. mail-list.com has several special auto-responders to help you operate your mailing list.
If you send an email to one of the auto-responders below, here's what comes back:
format at mail-list.com - Returns the contents of the body of your message, after performing several formatting functions. This auto-responder will insert carriage returns after 70 characters, convert quoted-printable encoded characters to plain ascii, and change non-ascii characters to blanks.
autoformat at mail-list.com - Also returns the contents of the body of your message, using a different program to format your message.
antiword at mail-list.com - Returns the contents of the Microsoft Word document that was attached. To use, send a blank message with the MS Word document attached. This document must end with a .DOC suffix.
htmltext at mail-list.com - Returns the simple plain contents of the body of your message, after removing MIME and HTML markup commands. Tries three (3) different methods, and returns seperate results.
showmx at mail-list.com - Returns the data associated with the MX records for the domain name of the email address. The MX records controls which machine the email will be delivered to.
spam-score at mail-list.com - Returns the score that SpamAssassin assigns to your email. Some ISP's use SpamAssassin to filter their customer's email. In order to avoid their spam filters you should try and keep the SpamAssasin score as low as possible.
This Advanced Owner's Manual provides advanced commands for operating your list more completely. In addition, there is a Really Advanced Owner's Manual which will describe even more commands and procedures.
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