Page 38 - Mercury Manual.book

33 Mailing lists
Using mailing lists

A Active record A normal subscriber, receiving mail
N NoMail record The subscriber is not currently receiving mail from
the list. NoMail records are indefinite - they do not expire.
V Vacation record The subscriber is not receiving mail, but will be au-
tomatically re-enabled at a particular date (you can inspect the date on
which the record will be re-enabled by opening the subscriber’s
record using the Change button).
S Suspended record The subscription has been set to NoMail by the
Mercury VERP processor (see above) because it has generated errors
in excess of the level allowed by the list's settings. A suspended record
is exactly like a NoMail record and can be re-enabled using the same
methods.
X Excluded record An "Excluded" record denotes an address that is not Naturally, neither deleted
permitted to subscribe to the list; you can use this option to prevent nor excluded addresses
troublemakers from re-subscribing to the list. receive list mailings - they
D Deleted record The subscriber has been removed from the list, but the are not really “subscrib-
ers” in the traditional
Mercury daily cleanup has not purged the deleted record yet. You sense.
cannot edit, delete or otherwise alter a deleted record.

The second character in the status string is D if the user receives the list in Digest mode, or N
if the user receives the list normally.

The third character in the status string is R if the user receives copies of his or her own post-
ings to the list (“R” stands for “Repro mode”, and is the default) or N if the user does not re-
ceive such copies.

To edit a subscriber's information, double-click his record, or click the Change button.

The Toggle button quickly changes a subscriber's status: if the user is currently marked as
"Active" (A), it changes the subscription to "NoMail" (N) and vice-versa. If the user is cur-
rently marked as being "On Vacation" (V), it changes the subscription to "Active" (A).

To find a subscriber quickly, click the Find button: this will open an incremental search win-
dow, in which you can search for the user by any part of his name, address or both. When
performing an incremental search, the portion of text you type in can appear anywhere within
the name or address – it need not appear at the beginning.
Mercury remembers the date that the subscriber joined the list, the number of submissions
made by the subscriber to the list since that time, and the date of the last submission made by
the subscriber. You can view and reset these statistics in the editor dialog for the user's mem-
bership record.

Using mailing lists

OK, you've created your mailing list... Now what do you do with it?

In general, the answer to this question depends on whether the list you have created is mod-
erated or unmoderated. For moderated lists, only users marked as list moderators may send
messages to the list: other users, even if they are subscribers, cannot send mail directly to the
list. Moderated lists are useful for low-volume announcement lists, or in cases where the sub-
ject matter sent to the list needs to be scrutinized before posting.