5DollarHosting.com: Support: Mailing Lists

Support Area: Mailing Lists

Control Center icons:

Overview
The Different Types of Lists
Installation
Creating a Mailing List
Mailing List Settings
Administering Your List
Subscribing and Unsubscribing Users
Using a Form to let Users Subscribe
Sending Mail to the List
Customizing the List
Uninstallation
Troubleshooting
Links to SmartList Resources Online

Overview

The SmartList mailing software we utilize is a powerful way to enable communication between and among your subscribers. You can create newsletters, moderated and un-moderated lists, all from your Control Center! Your contacts can automatically subscribe, post, and even unsubscribe without your intervention.

With our web-based management, you don't have to know any programming to set up, customize and administer your lists.

Back to top

The Different Types of Lists

There are 3 different mailing list types:

A Newsletter sends mail one-way only: fron the moderator out to the group. Members of the list cannot post to the list. This is a good way to send out news and updates to your members without expensive mailing list software.

Subscriber-only means that posts are accepted only from people subscribed to the list. This prevents outsiders from posting to all members. When a subscriber sends mail to the list address, all subscribers get the message. This is a good way for many people to communicate with each other without using a bulletin board.

Moderated is similar to Subscriber-only except that all posts go to the Moderator first for approval before being distributed to the subscribers.

Back to top

Installation

When you use the Mailing List button on your Control Center for the first time, you will see a message (below) indicating that the mailing list software is not installed:

Simply click the "Install Mailing List" button and the server will set up your account for using the SmartList within 10 minutes. This installs the binaries and templates used with the mailing list.

NOTES: the mailing list software does take up some room in your domain account, as do the archives created by it. Keep this in mind if you are tight on space, you may need to upgrade to the next plan level.

Also, from this point on, management of your list will be done through the "Mail Manager" icon, shown below.

Back to top

Creating Your Mailling List

Once installed, you set up and manage your lists from your Mail Manager screen:

Clicking "New List" brings up the following:

Choose a name for your mailing list, and click "Add". Now you are ready to set up your new list!

Back to top

Mailing List Settings

Once your list is created, now is the time to set it up. The first thing that needs to be done is to set up the List Maintainer. This is the person responsible for managing the list, and also the person who will act as moderator for it. You will enter the appropriate email address for the maintainer, and choose a password for security. You can also specify the maximum number of messages to be stored in the list archive (if space is a consideration you should keep it fairly low). The default is 10.

This screeen can also be used to delete the list entirely, and enter the Administration (X-Command) screen (see next section).

Once this is completed, you need to enter the "Administer [listname]" screen to choose what kind of list yours will be. There are 3 choices (see section on List Types above for information on the differences):

The screen shot below shows the Mailing List Manager screen, accessed from the link on the screen above

IMPORTANT NOTE: When you first set up a list, it is defaulted to a "Subscriber-Only" format. Even though the screen above shows the radio button checked for "Newsletter" it is *not* actually a Newsletter. To initialize the list as a Newsletter, you actually have to press the "Change List" button to have it set up properly.

Back to top

Administering Your List

Using the "Mailing List Manager" link above, you enter the "XCommand" screen. XCommands are SmartList functions that are usually performed from the command prompt of the server. Now with our web interface you can run commands on your list right from your browser, without the need to access the server command line. Here you can do any or all of the following:

To execute the XCommands, you will need to enter the List Maintainer email address and password for verification in the top part of the screen (above).

To subscribe to the mailing list, your member need only send an email with the word 'subscribe' in the 'Subject' field to the subscription address for your list, which takes this format:

To unsubscribe, the user can send an email with the word 'Unsubscribe' in the 'Subject' field to the same address as above.

What is the digest?
Primarily used in 'Subscriber-only' and 'Moderated' lists, this sends a collection of emails all in one large message, rather than receiving each individual message. Your users may appreciate the option of being able to receive one message and read it at their convenience. To subscribe to the digest version of the list, send a message with 'Subscribe' in the 'Subject' field to this address format:

To unsubscribe from the digest, simply send an email to the same address as above with the word 'Unsubscribe' in the 'Subject' field.

To allow your users to subscribe to your list by use of a form, we recommend the following easy method:

Set up your form using our server-wide FormMail script. As a reminder, the "Form Action=" tag should be set to "/cgi-sys/norman.pl" method="POST".

Make sure that you have at least these 2 hidden fields enabled: Subject and Recipient.

Subject needs to be set to 'Subscribe'.
Recipient needs to be set to the subscription address for your mailing list (see above section).

Also, the field that captures the subscriber's email address must be named 'email' (all lowercase, no hyphen).

Now, when visitors click 'submit', they are automatically subscribed to your list.

For privacy reasons, your subscribers will not see the email addresses of the other recipients in any message they receive from the SmartList.

The autoresponses that the mailing list software sends in response to various requests can be customized to personalize your list. The reponse messages are stored as editable text files which can be changed right online, or downloaded and altered using a plain text editor such as Notepad.

To edit the message templates online (recommneded), use your File Manager tool and navigate to the /yourdomain-mail/listname/ folder. Click once on the file to edit and the contents of the file will be displayed in a window for you to change. Click 'save' when done.

The files you can edit are:
subscribe.txt - This is the template for the welcome message sent out to new subscribers when their subscription request is received
unsubscribe.txt - Template for the message sent out to members who unsubscribe from the list
archive.txt - This is the message sent out when a message is received with 'archive' as the subject. The 'archive' command generates an email to the requestor with the archive contents
help.txt - This is the message sent out when an email is received by the list with 'help' as the subject line. This is useful for providing instructions to your users, and links to support resources if needed.

To download the messages for editing, connect using ftp and transfer the appropriate files from the /yourdomain-mail/listname/ folder. make sure to use ASCII format! Edit the appropriate file and upload again using ASCII format.

NOTE: If editing on your computer versus online in File Manager, you must make certain you are using a plain text editor such as Notepad. Altering these files with a word processor program like Microsoft Word often adds control codes and hidden fields and will likely damage or corrupt the file.

You should not attemp to alter any other files in the folder or you may cause the list to malfunction.

To remove a Mailing List, simply click on the list name in Mail Manager and then select the "delete mailing list" option

To disable mailing list functionality completely after all lists have been removed (and thereby save some space), you can select "Remove" in the Mailing List icon on your Control Center.

Problem: You set up your group to be a Newsletter, but subscribers can still send to it

Likely Solution: When installing the list for the first time, even though the radio button says 'Newsletter', you still must cliock the 'change' button to set the list type. Otherwise it will default to 'subscriber-only'.

Problem: You set up a form to allow users to subscribe but it isn't working properly

Problem: Make sure that the 'recipient' hidden field is set to the mailing list subscription address (list-request@domain.com). Also, make certain that the field name for the user's email address is named exaclty 'email' - all lowercase, no hyphen. This way, FormMail knows to include that as the 'from' field in the outgoing mail. Lastly, make sure the 'subject' hidden field is enabled and set to 'subscribe'.

NOTE: This manual makes many references to command-line instructions and X-Commands. Our Control Center interface does many of these things for you. Command-line accessibility is not necessary to use and customize SmartList.

There is also a SmartList mailing list of course! Send in your subscription requests to :