VUmail Mailing Lists FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Can I get a mailing list for the Sean Cassidy, Star Trek, etc. fan club?
2. How do I get rid of those annoying pop-up windows when I use Majorcool?
3. Can I make all messages from the list have the list name as the From address?
4. How do I prevent new users from getting an email welcome message?
5. How do I change the maximum message size the list will accept?
6. Can I make it so only members of the list can post?
7. Why did I get a bounce message for an email address not on the list?
8. How can I protect my list from spam or abusive postings?

1. Can I get a mailing list for the Sean Cassidy, Star Trek, etc. fan club?

No.  Mailing lists on list.vanderbilt.edu must be related to teaching, research, or university administration at Vanderbilt.  Officially sanctioned student groups may request lists for intragroup communication.
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2. How do I get rid of those annoying pop-up windows when I use Majorcool?

Go to prefs and turn off the Tool Tips on Button Bars option.
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3. Can I make all messages from the list have the list name as the From address?

No.  Messages sent to the list will have the list name in the To: field making it easy for recipients to filter such messages in their clients, but the From: will have the email address specified by the sender.  If you are worried that people who don't know how to reply-to-all will respond individually to posted messages rather than to the list at large, you can edit the reply to field to be the name of your list.   If you do set reply to to be the list, be forewarned that you risk bombarding your list members with bounce messages if one of the addresses on the list becomes undeliverable.  Such a scenario goes like this:

1. Message sent to listA@list.vanderbilt.edu, copy goes to all users
2. userA@somewhere.com is invalid.  Postmaster@somewhere.com auto-replies saying that userA is no longer valid.  Because reply-to is set to listA, all list members get the bounce message, including userA.
3. cycle repeats.  On every repetition, all list members get another copy of the bounce message. 
   

Go to modify,   select configuration, and set Welcome to no.
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5.How do I change the maximum message size the list will accept?

The list owner can set the maximum message size.  By default this option does not show up in Majorcool -- you must Go to prefs and turn on "Show All Fields of Configuration File".  Afterwards in modify you will see an option called maxlength which lets you specify the maximum message size in characters (bytes).
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6.Can I make it so only members of the list can post?

You can do this by setting the restrict post (resend) option to be the name of the list.  If you do this, email to the list will only be accepted from email addresses on the list.  The downside is that users with multiple email addresses will be able to send mail only from the email address by which they are subscribed. 
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7. Why did I get a bounce message for an email address not on the list?

Most likely your list contains an email address which is being forwarded elsewhere and it is the final recipient address which is bad.  For example, John Smith might have his John.q.smith@vanderbilt.edu address forwarded to jqsmith@aol.com.  If the jqsmith@aol.com address is invalid (perhaps John hasn't been paying his bill), then the owner of the list containing John.q.smith@vanderbilt.edu will get a bounce message from the AOL postmaster saying that jqsmith is not a valid user.  As a list owner, you probably want to remove the bad address from your mailing list and in this example it is easy to pick out which user to remove based on the similarity between jqsmith and john.q.smith.  In other instances, the addresses seem completely unrelated and you best bet will be to read carefully through the bounce message looking for an email address which corresponds to one on your list.
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8.    How can I protect my list from spam or abusive postings?

Majordomo gives the list owner three tools to restrict posting to a list:

1. Make the list moderated.  Go to  modify and set the moderate (resend) value to yes.  Any message sent goes to the moderator (by default the list owner) and will not be sent to the members of the list until the moderator approves the message and resends it to the list.  This is option gives the list owner greatest control, but can be inconvenient.
2. Configure the list so that only members of the list can post.  Instructions for doing this are in answer #6.
3. Disallow postings that contain particular strings in either the headers or body of a message .  Go to  modify  and enter a regular expression in either the taboo body or taboo header fields.  For example to disallow posting of messages that contain aol.com anywhere in the headers, enter aol.com in the taboo body field.
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