Managing project mailing lists

Project help for project owner administration: Index

Project owner administration
  Editing and maintaining the Project Home page
  Managing project site news
  Managing project files
  Adding project members and approving roles
  You are here: Configuring and managing project mailing lists
  - About default project mailing lists
  - Adding and deleting mailing lists
  - Mailing list administration and policies
  - Editing subscribers and moderators
  Managing project documentation
  Managing project source code
  Tracking project issues
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About default project mailing lists

All project mailing lists are created with anzu, an open source mail alias and list management extension of qmail simple mail transfer protocol (smtp). Anzu supports multiple domains, enabling each project to define and manage its own unique set of mailing lists for the project domain.

If you created your project as a standard development project, your project begins its life with five built-in, pre-configured mailing lists:

> dev@projectname.domain.com
>   The main list for developers to discuss specific project development issues and requirements for version control in the project.

> cvs@projectname.domain.com
>   Automated notifications of file version control changes and discussion of those changes.

> announce@projectname.domain.com
>   Announcements of new releases and other major project events.

> issues@projectname@domain.com
>   Automated notifications and discussions of the project's reported issues (defects, enhancements, features, tasks, and patches) and changes made to issues, such as reassignment, comments, or resolution.

> users@projectname.domain.com
>   A more general discussion list for the project's end users.

Discussion-only projects are set up with one discussion mailing list initially.

You can access your project's existing mailing lists in two different ways:

- Clicking the Mailing Lists link in the Project Resources tool bar displays your project's Mailing Lists page. An edit link appears for each mailing list that opens a Mailing List Edit screen for that particular list.

- In the Project Edit page (reached by clicking the Admin link in the Project Resources tool bar), links at the bottom of the page lead to a Mailing List Edit screen for each list.

For an explanation of fields and options on the Mailing List Edit page, see Mailing list administration and policies below.

Adding and deleting mailing lists

Your project's growth and progression may warrant adding mailing lists at some point ... or perhaps deleting lists. The default mailing lists created along with your project are "top-level" lists. Should traffic relating to a particular module or component becomes too high for one or more of these lists, you can splinter that discussion off into its own arena by create a separate new mailing list.

Add a new mailing list by going to the Project Edit page and clicking the "new" link in the bottom Mailing Lists section. This action leads you to the Add New Mailing List page to set up and configure your newest list. See the following section about list administration and policies for more information about the fields and settings in this screen.

To delete a mailing list, click the mailing list link in the Project Edit page to open Edit Mailing List page. Click the Delete Mailing List link just above the buttons on this screen. Another page displays asking for delete confirmation before the action is completed.

Mailing list administration and policies

As the project owner you can choose to modify your project's default mailing list settings, add new lists, delete unnecessary lists, add and remove subscribers, designate moderators, and set other mailing list parameters.

Both the Add Mailing List and Edit Mailing List page settings include:

- a list description text field,
- a prefix to appear on the subject line of all messages,
- an automatically generated trailer with subscribe/unsubscribe instructions which can be toggled on or off.

The "List Type" options refer to how you want to set the mailing list policies for handling subscriptions and posting.

- If your project is under proprietary licensing, your mailing lists are restricted to project members only and the list archives are also private by default. Only users who are members of your private project have the necessary permissions to view these mailing lists and the associated archives.

- If your project is under open source licensing, you can select among several different combination of these policies, depending upon the purpose of the list.

Posting policy
  This determines how the list handles posts from non-subscribers and subscribers. For open source projects, mailing lists can be configured to handle message posts at three different levels:

  - "Discuss" allows subscribers to post, and moderates posts (requires approval) from non-subscribers.

  - "Moderated" moderates all posts.

  - "Unmoderated" allows anyone to post messages without moderation.

Subscription moderation
  This determines whether subscription to the list is "open" or "-private." Anyone can subscribe to open lists. Marking a list as "private" has two implications:

  - Subscribers must be approved by the list moderator.

  - List archives are not publicly viewable. Users who do not have permission to see the archives do not see links to subscribe to these lists either.

  By default, subscriptions to proprietary project mailing lists are on an approval basis because these lists are always private. This means that even members of a private project must be approved by a list moderator to subscribe to project mailing lists.

Editing subscribers and moderators

You can add and remove mailing list subscribers, designate list moderators, and suppress certain users from posting messages using the links in the "Members" section of the Edit Mailing List page: Edit Subscribers, Edit Digest Subscribers, Edit Moderators, Edit Allowed Posters.

These links display an edit screen where you can designate users by email address for the desired action. You may also imposed list filters in this screen.

Even for those mailing lists you have designated as unmoderated, you always have control over who may post messages to any of your project mailing lists as the project owner. If someone abuses list privileges or fails to comply with mailing list etiquette on an unmoderated list, you must be able to disallow further postings from this person. For moderated lists, your designated moderator has the permissions to edit list subscribers.

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