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 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 now we have a basic understanding of majordomo, but we need to 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.
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 set you up and from there you can make other configurations to your hearts content.
Here is the list of basic commands,
subscribe (list) [(address)]
unsubscribe (list) [(address)]
which [(address)] -see which list an address belongs to.
who (list) - see who is on the list. Can be turned off.
info (list) - Get the info message that is sent out when
someone signs up
index (list) - Get a list of the index of files available
from the list
get (list) - get a file available from the list
lists - a list of lists served by the majordomo
help - reproduces this list
end - stops processing commands for majordomo
