3.1.5 Additional settings

This section contains some miscellaneous settings for your mailing list.

emergency

When this option is enabled, all list traffic is emergency moderated, i.e. held for moderation. Turn this option on when your list is experiencing a flamewar and you want a cooling off period.

new_member_options

Each member has a set of subscription options which they can use to control how they receive messages and otherwise interact with the list. While the members can change these settings by logging into their personal options page, you might want to set the default for a number of the member options. You can do that with this variable, but see also the other categories for other member defaults you can set.

This variable presents a set of checkboxes which control the defaults for some of the member options. Conceal the member's address specifies whether or not the address is displayed in the list roster. Acknowledge the member's posting controls whether or not Mailman sends an acknowledgement to a member when they post a message to the list. Do not send a copy of a member's own post specifies whether a member posting to the list will get a copy of their own posting. Filter out duplicate messages to list members (if possible) specifies whether members who are explicitly listed as a recipient of a message (e.g. via the Cc: header) will also get a copy from Mailman.

Of course, members can always override these defaults by making changes on their membership options page.

administrivia

This option specifies whether Mailman will search posted messages for admimistrivia, in other words, email commands which usually should be posted to the -request address for the list. Setting this to Yes helps prevent such things as unsubscribe messages getting erroneously posted to the list.

If a message seems to contain administrivia, it is held for moderator approval.

max_message_size

This option specifies a maximum message size, in kilobytes, over which the message will be held for moderator approval.

host_name

This option specifies the host name part of email addresses used by this list. For example, this is the example.com part of the posting address mylist@example.com.

It's generally not a good idea to change this value, since its default value is specified when the mailing list is created. Changing this to an incorrect value could make it difficult to contact your mailing list. Also not that the url used to visit the list's pages is not configurable through the web interface. This is because if you messed it up, you'd have to have the site administrator fix it.

include_rfc2369_headers

RFC 2369 is an internet standard that describes a bunch of headers that mailing list managers should add to messages to make it easier for people to interact with the list. Mail reading programs which support this standard may provide buttons for easy access to the list's archives, or for subscribing and unsubscribing to the list. It's generally a good idea to enable these headers as it provides for an improved user experience. These headers are often called the List-* headers.

However, not all mail readers are standards compliant yet, and if you have a large number of members who are using non-compliant mail readers, they may be annoyed at these headers. You should first try to educate your members as to why these headers exist, and how to hide them in their mail clients. As a last resort you can disable these headers, but this is not recommended.

include_list_post_header

The List-Post: header is one of the headers recommended by RFC 2369. However for some announce-only mailing lists, only a very select group of people are allowed to post to the list; the general membership is usually not allowed to post to such lists. For lists of this nature, the List-Post: header is misleading. Select No to disable the inclusion of this header. (This does not affect the inclusion of the other List-* headers.)