Majordomo

What is a majordomo or a listserv? Well these are mailing tools to help you stay in touch with people by email. The different possibilties of things you can do with these programs is wide and varied. We are going to look at a few parts and give you some information on how to get started. You can get a basic mailing list/archive set-up in a short amount of time, but the options you have available will take a little time to review.

If you have never been on a mailing list before, you might not understand what a list does or how to interface with the list. A mailing list is like a usenet newsgroup, where the list is usually centered on a topic. Like for example, the BC News list we have set up for our clients. Instead of us sending out messages to each one of you about some new feature, addition, etc. we can send one message to the list and majordomo will send it out to everyone.

Here is where majordomo gets confusing because it is more than just a announcement service. The list can be configured for many different things.

You could have the list so that your recipients can also post messages back to the list, which would in turn send the same message to everyone on the list.

You can keep archives of all the messages and make them available by sending commands to the list.

You can have digest options which will put many messages into one message for the receipent.

You can make the list into a nice information source if you want to go that extra mile.

Mailing lists don't have to be just for talk though, you can easily transport these into commercial ideas.

Keep your customers informed of new products that come out.

Do some market research on your clients and survey them for their needs in your services or products.

The more creative it is, the more likely it is to give you some valuable input on your business. Look at our forest idea for an example of a creative use for a mailing list.

In our forest we also use a program called Hypermail which will archive your list by subject,date,author, or thread. Hypermail takes this archive and makes it into a set a of web pages for easy browsing of the list. There is also another program called procmail that might be of interest if you really get into mail. It can help you customize your mailbox to respond and sort mail in many different fashions.

So we have an understanding but fill in the details, how does this work by email? The easiest way to think about interfacing with majordomo, is to think of the email message being your screen. You send a email with commands in it to majordomo and it responds with the output of those commands. You wouldn't believe the amount of people who can not understand how to do this, or maybe you do if you are on any list.

The hard part I think for people is to distinguish the fact that there is usually two different addresses to send information to, one for commands on your account and one to post "talk type" information. If you post a majordomo command to the "talk type" address, the message would be sent to everyone on the list instead of telling the program to do something. The majordomo program is getting smarter and can usually intercept these "mistakes", but some still do get by the program.

A normal "talk type" message would go like

To:
From:
Subject:New Forest Announcement
----------------------------------------------------
Howdy,

The new trees are up and you can see all the details at blah, blah, blah......

A majordomo command message would be like

To:
From:
Subject:
----------------------------------------------------
approve passwd subscribe tapes

----------------------------------------------------

As you can see, there are two different addresses these letters are sent to, one is the name of the and the other is to the majordomo . The majordomo message does not have or need a subject. The command line is actually the command to subscribe someone automatically to the list. This could be the case in a moderated list.

There are many different commands available to control how majordomo works for you. Some of the commands are common user commands and others are more administrative type commands. We have not included the more advanced administrative commands here, but will install a file for your use when we set up your mailing list. The advanced commands do things like change the configuration, change the password for the list, and other administrative functions.

The basic user commands will be all that you will really have to deal with and they are listed below. To get started with your list, you need to send us the name of the list, a password, who is the list maintainer(i.e. you), and any pre-configurations, if you already know what you want for the list. We will and from there you can make other configurations to your heart's content.

Here is the list of basic commands,

    subscribe  [