Page 33 - Mercury Manual.book

Mailing lists 28
Mailing list settings and options

Size limit If you enter a non-zero value in this field, then only messages smaller than that
number of bytes can be distributed to the list - messages larger than the limit will be returned
to the sender with an error. Leaving this entry set to zero allows messages of any size to be
distributed to the list.

Automatically redirect unauthorised postings to the primary moderator If this control is
checked, Mercury will forward unauthorised list postings to the first moderator in the mod-
erator list (the primary moderator). Clearly, this setting has no effect if mail can be submitted
to the list by anyone. The moderator will receive the message in a special multipart format
that preserves the original message intact - using most competent mail clients, it should be
easy for the moderator to forward the original message with or without changes to the list to
allow it to be distributed.

Require an X-Password field with a valid password for submissions When this control is
checked, Mercury will only accept messages for submission to the list if it can find an X-
Password header field in the message's headers, and that header contains either a valid mod-
erator password or a valid subscriber password (see below). Many mail clients will permit
you to add custom headers to messages - in Pegasus Mail, for instance, you would add the X-
Password field in the Special view of the Message Editor window.

Subscription passwords Mercury allows you to require that subscribers provide a password
in order to subscribe to a list. Password-protected subscription of this type is very useful if
you want to prevent people from casually subscribing to a list but do not want to force a mod-
erator to become involved with every subscription. You will typically provide the subscrip-
tion password by some external means, such as via a reference on a web page, or by e-mail.

Moderator passwords A password or passwords can be associated with a mailing list. When
this is done, commands that can only be issued by moderators will need the password before
they can be processed. The password is supplied by issuing a PASSWORD command in the
message to the mail server at some point in the message prior to the command that needs it.
So, if you have set the password fubar on the list called vobis on your server and a mod-
erator wants to add a user to that list, he or she will need to send something like this:

password fubar
add vobis user@host.domain

Subscriber passwords Subscriber passwords are like Moderator passwords, but are only used
in association with X-Password header lines to authorize messages for delivery to the mailing
list.

Single passwords vs password files For subscription, moderator and subscriber passwords,
you can provide either a single password, or a file of passwords. If you provide a file of pass-
words, then any password in the file can be used to gain access to the feature it controls. This
latter approach allows you to give each moderator or subscriber his own password, and re-
voke it without affecting other users in the event that he or she ceases to need access.

Default account password for new subscribers If you wish, you can provide a default pass-
word that will be automatically applied to new subscriptions if the subscription request does
not include a specific password. The user can typically change the password any time he or
she wishes using the MercuryB Web server’s Mailing List Subscriber Services (MLSS) mod-
ule (see the section on MercuryB later in this manual for more details).