2.1.1 General list personality

These variables, grouped under the general list personality section, control some public information about the mailing list.

real_name

Every mailing list has both a posting name and a real name. The posting name shows up in urls and in email addresses, e.g. the mylist in mylist@example.com. The posting name is always presented in lower case, with alphanumeric characters and no spaces. The list's real name is used in some public information and email responses, such as in the general list overview. The real name can differ from the posting name by case only. For example, if the posting name is mylist, the real name can be MyList.

owner

This variable contains a list of email addresses, one address per line, of the list owners. These addresses are used whenever the list owners need to be contacted, either by the system or by end users. Often, these addresses are used in combination with the moderator addresses (see below).

moderator

This variable contains a list of email addresses, one address per line, of the list moderators. These addresses are often used in combination with the owner addresses. For example, when you email mylist-owner@example.com, both the owner and moderator addresses will receive a copy of the message.

description

In the general list overview page, which shows you every available mailing list, each list is displayed with a short description. The contents of this variable is that description. Note that in emails from the mailing list, this description is also used in the comment section of the To: address. This text should be relatively short and no longer than one line.

info

This variable contains a longer description of the mailing list. It is included at the top of the list's information page, and it can contain HTML. However, blank lines will be automatically converted into paragraph breaks. Preview your HTML though, because unclosed or invalid HTML can prevent display of parts of the list information page.

subject_prefix

This is a string that will be prepended to the Subject: header of any message posted to the list. For example, if a message is posted to the list with a Subject: like:

    Subject: This is a message

and the subject_prefix is [My List] (note the trailing space!), then the message will be received like so:

    Subject: [My List] This is a message

If you leave subject_prefix empty, no prefix will be added to the Subject:. Mailman is careful not to add a prefix when the header already has one, as is the case in replies for example. The prefix can also contain characters in the list's preferred language. In this case, because of vagarities of the email standards, you may or may not want to add a trailing space.

author_is_list

Setting this variable to Yes causes the From: address to be replaced by the list address so that policies like ADSP or DMARC can be applied.

anonymous_list

This variable allows you to turn on some simple anonymizing features of Mailman. When you set this option to Yes, Mailman will remove or replace the From:, Sender:, and Reply-To: fields of any message posted to the list.

Note that this option is simply an aid for anonymization, it doesn't guarantee it. For example, a poster's identity could be evident in their signature, or in other mail headers, or even in the style of the content of the message. There's little Mailman can do about this kind of identity leakage.