Mailing Lists

Installing the necessary software

• The software is normally installed as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Mail Man mailing list software): http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html
• If mailman is not installed, sudo yum install mailman should install the required package.

Creating the mailing list

1. Create the list at the command line on grand
2. Command: sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist
   1. Enter name of list
   2. Enter email of admin (person running list). Probably TA or project leader
   3. Enter admin password for this list
   4. You will be presented with a list of aliases that need to be created. Copy this into a buffer/temporary file
3. Paste these aliases into /etc/aliases
4. Run: sudo /usr/bin/newaliases
5. You can now admin the list at: http://grand.cs.ualberta.ca/mailman/admin/LISTNAME
6. Secure the installation by changing a few settings:
7. On the main page you may want to set to “0” the setting “Maximum length in kilobytes (KB) of a message body.”
8. On the Privacy options set “What steps are required for subscription?” to be “Confirm and Approve”
9. Again, on privacy options set “Advertise this list when people ask what lists are on this machine” to be “No”
10. Under “Archiving Options”, set “Is archive file source for public or private archival?” to “private”.

Killing an obsolete mailing list

You need to run the commands as sudo. Be careful as always.

Remove the list from mailman: Commandline using:

• sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/rmlist -a listname
• The -a removes the archives on disk
• You can get params and help on any of the binaries for mailman with something like:
• sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/rmlist -h

Remove the aliases (to avoid cruft) in /etc/aliases

• Open /etc/aliases in your favourite editor (emacs of course!)
• After removing/adding entries, you need to run the command: sudo newaliases

Managing Mailing List Rules from the Forum

You can manage who gets automatically subscribed/unsubscribed by going to Special:MailingListRules

1. Select the mailing list to edit

2. Add/Edit a rule

   1. Select the type of rule (Role, Project, Phase, Location)

   2. Then select the value of that rule

   3. The rules which have the same type use the ‘OR’ operation, and those which are of different types use the ‘AND’ operation when evaluating whether or not a person should be in that list

      1. For example if the rules are as follows:

         • Role: PNI
         • Role: CNI
         • Location: Toronto
         • Project: KNOW

         It will result in the following boolean expression: ((Role == PNI || Role == CNI) && (Location == ‘Toronto’) && (Project == ‘KNOW’))