Page 34 - Mercury Manual.book

29 Mailing lists
Mailing list settings and options

Automatically generate and assign passwords for subscribers without them When this con-
trol is checked, Mercury will do two things: first, whenever a new subscriber is added to the
list, it will automatically create a randomly-generated list access password for the subscriber
(the password will be shown in the welcome message sent to the user). Secondly, when a user
with no current password uses the "Forgotten your password for a list" option in the Mercu-
ryB web-based mlss subscription management module, it will automatically generate a pass-
word and assign it to the subscriber's account before mailing out the notification. Note that
this option overrides the Default account password option described above - if both are se-
lected, this is the one that will take precedence.
The Distribution Page
Headers and URLs If the Generate helper URL headers option is turned on, Mercury will
add specially-formatted headers to messages distributed to the list which will permit compli- In Pegasus Mail, the right-
ant mail programs like Pegasus Mail to perform automatic subscription management for the most status indicator (an
user. If you have a web page that describes the operation of the mailing list, enter its URL in envelope with a tick and
cross beneath it) will be
the Help URL field. Using Helper headers and URLs can result in a considerable improve- enabled if Helper URL
ment in the usability and friendliness of your lists. For more information on the format and Headers are available in
the message.
function of Helper URLs, please see Internet Standards Document RFC2369.
Web-based (using MercuryB) If you have installed and enabled Mercury's HTTP server,
MercuryB, then you can instruct Mercury to generate helper URLs that refer to the "mlss"
(Mailing List Subscriber Services) service run by MercuryB. When this control is checked,
Mercury will ask MercuryB for the proper URL and port for access to the mlss service mod-
ule, and will use that in the helper URL headers instead of maiser commands. Most users find
it much easier to manage their settings using a web page than to send commands to a mail
server, so this option is recommended unless you have specific reasons not to use it. If you
enable this command but MercuryB is not loaded, Mercury will not generate those helper
URL headers that depend on it.

Signature file A list signature is a small text file that is automatically appended to the end of List signatures currently
every message distributed to the list membership. In digest mode, the list signature is append- only work correctly with
ed once as a separate message at the end of the digest. The first line of the list signature must plain text messages. They
will not work with messag-
contain the text to be placed in the "Subject" field of the digest part; the remainder of the sig- es containing HTML data.
nature can be whatever text you wish to include. The "subject" line is ignored for non-digest
subscribers. List signatures are usually used to include information on unsubscribing from the
list, or on contacting the list moderator. They are optional - if you do not want to define a list
signature, leave this field blank. Remember: the first line of the message is the digest subject
line - you must leave a blank line there if your list does not support digests.
Force replies to go to the list (using the reply-to header) If you check this control, Mercury
will place the mailing list's address in the reply-to field of all messages distributed to the list.
This will cause any competent mail client to send replies to the list instead of to the person
who originally sent the message.

Disable header stripping for this list (allow headers to pass through) Usually, when Mercury
distributes a message to a mailing list, it rebuilds the message’s headers, discarding the ma-
jority of the headers from the original: only headers that are essential to the structure of the
message (for example, Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding) are pre-
served, all others being replaced by new versions. In some cases, this may interfere with cer-
tain types of message; in such cases, you may find it useful to check this control, which tells
Mercury to leave all headers in the message as they are, with the exception of key addressing
headers (most notably From and Reply-To). Use of this control is not tied to any hard and
fast rules, and you will need to decide for yourself whether it is appropriate for your list.