Preventing Mailman annoyances
Inspired by TheHodge’s “After you install Wordpress” article, I made a note of the things I did to configure a Mailman mailing list, after creating it. Much of this is to make the look-and-feel replicate how I used to run Majordomo lists.
Firstly, I like the Bounce handling and web-interface to Mailman, so this is why I don’t just run Majordomo for lists any more. Its worth pointing this out, in case you wonder why I still use tool B, even though I have to do lots of work to make it work like tool A !
After running newlist, I recommend the following configuration changes (defaults which are changed assume you are running the Debian packaged Mailman) :
- General Options – make the administrators email address a role account that you will not subscribe to the mailing list. This is basically so that if you bounce an administration message from Mailman, due to your spam filters or an error, Mailman wont decide to unsubscribe you from the mailing list! I have had this happen to me before when I used to hand-check spam directed at uknot.
- Decapitalise public name of the list – to make it look neater, and more like the output of the ‘lists’ command in majordomo. Don’t forget to decapitalise the subject line tag if you do this. I also tend to make the subject line tag very small so that on little displays, it’s still possible to scan a folder and read threads of interest on subject alone.
- Disable monthly reminders – they are really annoying to your subscribers, and Debian’s default position is disabled, but some implementations do not disable subscription reminders.
- My users get confused by the Filter out duplicate messages to list members option. When a list subscriber is cc:d to a list post, users tend to expect to see a copy of the mail in their inbox, and their mailing list archive. I turn the filter off so that this happens.
- I tend to enable the Should administrator get notices of subscribes and unsubscribes option, so that I can track whether promoting a list in a certain place has worked!
- In “Non Digest options”, if I am migrating for a Majordomo list, I empty the box for message footer, and also tend to remove it when its a geek mailing list, as to most high volume mail readers, its obvious when an email has been posted to a mailing list, because its filtered into the correct mailbox ! For low volume lists that are intended for low volume mail readers, the footer might be useful.
- Check the reply to option, so that mailing lists that are intended to promote on-list discussion have a header that directs conversation back to the list, and mailing lists that will yield a high proportion of off-list mail do not have this header.
- Be slightly annoyed with me that the only English option in ‘Language Options’ is English (USA) when there is no English (UK).
Happy list-administration!
And you may find the following lists interesting to your work :
- mailop, for those who work in the field of mail systems administration.
- experts, for those who work in expert e-commerce roles.
- uknof, for those who work in network engineering roles, or systems/ISP environments.
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