Page 30 - Mercury Manual.book

25 Mailing lists
Mailing list settings and options

in a list address (this restriction is imposed by the standards governing Internet mail, not by
Mercury specifically).

The filename for a mail-
The membership file is a file Mercury uses to store information about the current subscribers ing list’s membership file
to the list. It need not exist (in fact, it should not exist when you create the list), and must have must include a full path,
the extension .MLF (Mercury will automatically add this extension for you). You must pro- preferably in an absolute
format such as UNC. The
vide a full path to the membership file: if the file is to be located on a network drive, we extension for a list mem-
strongly recommend you use the Windows UNC format (\\server\path\file) to specify bership file is always
.MLF.
this path.

The Change selection and Remove selection buttons allow you to edit the two mandatory set-
tings for a list and remove a list from your system, respectively – use the Remove selection
button with care; once deleted, a list cannot be restored. You can also double-click any exist-
ing list entry to edit its settings and membership.

Copying lists
A quick and effective way of creating new lists is to copy an existing list, using the Copy but-
ton. Copying a list creates a new list (so you have to provide a list name and a membership
file) , then gives you a number of options for setting up the new list based on the settings,
membership and moderator list of the current selection in the list. You can choose to import
the current list’s moderators and subscribers. If you choose to import current subscribers, you
can choose to import only active members, and can reset posting statistics and subscription
dates if you wish.

Tip: If you use a lot of lists, try creating some basic lists set up the way you like, then use The Copy button can be
them as templates for new lists, by copying one of the basic lists instead of creating a new used as a fast way of cre-
ating pre-configured
one. lists..
Managing a list’s settings and membership
When you create or edit the settings for a mailing list, you will be presented with a tabbed
dialog that has five pages:

• General Contains the basic definition for the list, and is where you specify any modera-
tors that the list should have.
• List access Allows you to control the way people subscribe to the list, and to control
who can send mail to the list for distribution. This is also where you set passwords for
list access.
• Distribution Includes controls that determine how Mercury should construct the mes-
sages that it sends to the list membership. You can enable digest support, anonymous
mailing facilities and other distribution settings in this page.
• Error handling Allows you to control the way delivery errors should be processed when
mail is sent out to the list.
• Membership Lists the current subscribers and their personal settings.
The General Page
List title Every list must have a title -- a descriptive name that Mercury will use to form the
"from" field of messages sent to the list. Try to keep the title short and descriptive and avoid
international or accented characters. On rare occasions, you may wish to include address de-
tails as part of the title (Mercury usually adds the proper address to the list title automatical-
ly): in this case, you should ensure that the address you enter conforms to RFC2822
addressing rules and includes a fully-qualified domain address appropriate for the list, then
check the control labelled Is a full address next to the list title. NOTE: This feature is extreme-