34.10. Moderating and Maintaining a Mailing List

If your mailing list requires maintainer approval to subscribe or unsubscribe, you will have to deal with messages sent by Majordomo when someone wants to join or leave the list. These emails will have subject lines like SUBSCRIBE example-list [email protected] or UNSUBSCRIBE example-list [email protected]. To approve a subscription, you must send email to the Majordomo address on your system containing the line approve password subscribe list address.

In this command, password must be the maintenance password set for the list on the subscription and moderation page, list must be the name of the list to which to add the subscriber, and address must be his email address. In fact, it is possible to use this command at any time to add someone to a list, even if they have not asked to join.

Similarly, to approve the unsubscription of a list member you must send the command approve password subscribe list address to the Majordomo address.

If you are the moderator for a mailing list, you will receive a message with a subject like BOUNCE: [email protected]: Approval required whenever someone tries to post to the list. In the body of the message will be the original email that was sent to the list address, which you are supposed to read to make sure it is appropriate for posting.

Unfortunately, the only way to approve a message is to save the entire email to a file and run the approve command on it. For example, if the message was saved to /tmp/email you would run approve /tmp/email to send it to the list. In addition, you must create a file called .majordomo in your UNIX home directory that contains the names of lists, their moderator passwords, and Majordomo email addresses. The .majordomo file must be formatted like this:

first-listname        first-password        [email protected]
second-listname       second-password       [email protected]

Future versions of Webmin will hopefully simplify the approval process.