Mailman is created mainly as an application for discussion groups, when everyone can post a message that will be mailed to everyone, however you can configure it as a powerful one-way post list, for occasional announcements or your weekly newsletter…

1) Open the configuration web page of your list (usually at your-domain/mailman/admin/your-list-name_your-domain/general). As you see the configuration page opens in the General Options section.

2) Define the list admin and moderator addresses (the same address can be used for both). In the same (General Options) page, you can “Hide the sender of a message, replacing it with the list address“. Perhaps it would be more professional and safe to use the address of the list itself as the sender, but sometimes certain servers may consider such mail as spam.

3) In the same page (General Options), Choose “Yes” in the option, “should any existing Reply-To header found in the original message be stripped?“, and in the next option “Where are replies to list messages directed?“, choose an “explicit address” and define this address. It can be a “trash” address, a forwarder, whatever, according to what you are going to do with these messages – just ignore them, or check if someone tries to contact you with a question.

4) In the same page (General Options), select “No” to the question “Send monthly password reminders?”

5) “Send mail to poster when their posting is held for approval?” – Check the “No” option.

6) Still in General Options, to the question “Should postings include the List-Post: header?“, select “No”.

7) After General Options, the next section we need to care about in this guide, is the Membership section. Go there, and at its first page “Membership List / Additional Member Tasks” check the “On” option at “Set everyone’s moderation bit, including those members not currently visible.” This means that not a single post will be distributed un-moderated. You want to moderate even your own posts, in case someone impersonates you, using the same address as yours.

8) Leaving the Membership section, go next to Non-digest options. Select “Yes” to the question “Can subscribers choose to receive mail immediately, rather than in batched digests?“, since you are not going to have digests at all.

9) Next, to the section of Digest options, select “No” to the question “Can list members choose to receive list traffic bunched in digests?“, and select “Regular” to the question “Which delivery mode is the default for new users?”

10) At the next section, Privacy options, select “No” to the question “Advertise this list when people ask what lists are on this machine?“. Towards the end of the questions, select “List admin only” to the question “Who can view subscription list?”

11) Still in Privacy options, go to “Sender filters” and select “Yes” to the question “By default, should new list member postings be moderated?” and select “Discard” as the “Action to take when a moderated member posts to the list.” Next add a nice rejection notice text to the text box, such as “this is an announcement list; to reach me please email at [email protected] or visit my contact page at …”

Still at “Sender filters” add a non-member address that will always be moderated (not discarded); this is the address you are going to use to post your Newsletter to the list. Since all member addresses will be discarded by default, you need a non-member address to post to the list — and this one not approved by default (in case someone impersonates you), but always moderated.

12) Finally, to let the visitors of your site subscribe or unsubscribe easily, you can have on your site a form that would send to yourlistname-request@yourdomain these commands (without brackets around the email address):

subscribe address=<ADDRESS> or, unsubscribe address=<ADDRESS>

Remember to include a link to your unsubscribe page in each issue of your newsletter. Enjoy!

TheFreeWindows.com