User Guide - Majordomo
- 01/04/2009 9:02 AM
Applicable Plans - All eApps General VPS Plans (not available for Plesk or cPanel)
User Guide - Majordomo mailing list manager
Majordomo is a mailing list manager written in Perl and distributed by Great Circle Associates. Majordomo has been in use since 1992, and the current release of 1.94.5 was released in 2000. The main site for Majordomo with links to the FAQ and documentation is here – http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/ The Wikipedia page for Majordomo is here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majordomo_(software) and also has links to useful information.Overview
Majordomo is ancient and arcane software, and was developed in a time when there was an Internet, but no World Wide Web. It works out of the box in the eApps hosting environment, but with a very basic configuration. Due to its age and complexity, it is difficult to offer support for Majordomo that goes beyond the most basic setup.eApps offers both Majordomo and Mailman for mailing list software. If you are more comfortable using Mailman, please see the Mailman User Guide for information on how to use that application.
If you are new to mailing lists, Mailman is probably the better overall choice.
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In this User Guide, the domain of example.com is used as a placeholder domain, and listname is used as a place holder for your actual mailing list name. Please substitute your actual domain name and listname where necessary. |
Installing Majordomo
Adding and Configuring a Mailing List
Configuration Files
Adding Users
Links to other information
Installing Majordomo
Login to your Control Panel, and click on the System Tab. If necessary, click the Select Another System (Subscription) link on the left and choose the correct system.If you are not sure if Majordomo is installed, look for a Mailing Lists option in the Mail Management section of the System Tab. If you see this, then the application is installed, and you can skip the next steps. If you do not see a Mailing Lists link, then please continue with the next steps.
Go to Applications, and click on the Add Application link. Select the box next to Majordomo, and then scroll down and click the Next button.
This takes you back to the All Applications screen. Wait for five minutes, then click on the Refresh link at the upper right, just under the word Parallels. The application should now show as installed. If it is still in a Scheduled state, wait another five minutes, and click Refresh again. If you see it in Error state, or it still shows as Scheduled, please contact eApps Technical Support.
Majordomo also installs the Autoresponder package, which allows users to set up automatic replies for e-mails based on rules.
On CentOS4, you could have either Majordomo OR Mailman installed, but not both. On CentOS5 you are able to install both.
Adding and Configuring a Mailing List
To add a mailing list, login to your Control Panel, and click on the System Tab. If necessary, click the Select Another System(Subscription) link on the left and choose the correct system.Go to Mail Management, Mailing Lists, and click on Add Mailing List to create a new list.
Add Mailing List
- Name – this is the name of the list. Chose the relevant domain from the drop-down menu. Note that only domains listed in the Control Panel for this VPS are available.
- Owner E-mail - the e-mail address of the list owner. It can be either an e-mail address on the VPS or an external address
- Existing mailbox or forwarding address – choose an existing e-mail address or forward from the drop-down menu.
- E-mail address – choose this option to use an e-mail address that does not exist on the VPS, such as a gmail or yahoo e-mail address.
- Mailing list introduction - enter a description of the mailing list that will be sent to the subscribers.
Configuring a Mailing List
Once the mailing list has been created, click on the name of the list to configure it. This brings you to a screen with four tabs, General – Subscribers – Advanced – Usage Guidelines.General
Click the Edit button to change the Owner E-mail and the Mailing list introduction. The list can also be Deleted from here. The Mailing list name and Mailing list address cannot be changed.Subscribers
The list owner’s e-mail address is automatically added to the list subscribers. To add a new subscriber, click on the New Subscriber link.New Subscriber
- Full e-mail address – add the full e-mail address of a subscriber here. This can be any valid e-mail address on the Internet.
- Local e-mail – select this to add any user that already has an e-mail address on the VPS, by choosing them from the drop-down menu.
If there are a lot of e-mail addresses to add, this method is very tedious and unnecessary. There is a way to add a large number of users at once, which will be covered in the Adding Users section.
Advanced
The Advanced tab allows you to set the Admin and Approval passwords, the Subject prefix, the Subscribe policy and the Message fronter and footer. To access any of these options, click on the Edit button.- Admin password – by default it is listname.admin
- Approve password – by default it is listname.pass
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These passwords are only relevant when using e-mail to directly manage a Majordomo mailing list. There generally should be no need to change them. If you are actively managing or trying to manage a Majordomo list using e-mail commands, that is outside of our support. If you are trying to do this you should become very familiar with the Majordomo FAQ – http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/majordomo-faq.html. There are also many other Majordomo tutorials online. We only support what can be directly managed through the Control Panel. |
- Subject prefix – this can precede the actual subject of the e-mail. For example, the ‘foo’ mailing list can have a Subject prefix of [FOO], so that every e-mail from the list will insert [FOO] into the subject line of the e-mail.
- Subscribe policy – this determines how open the list is non-subscribers wanting to subscribe. There are three choices available from the drop-down menu.
- Open + Confirm – is the default setting. This means anyone can subscribe to the list, but they have to confirmed by the list owner before they can post messages or receive messages from the list
- Open – any one can subscribe and post to the list without list owner approval.
- Closed – the list is closed to new subscribers. Any new subscriber must be added by the list owner directly.
- Message fronter – text to be inserted before any messages sent to the list.
- Message footer – text to be added to the end of all messages sent to the list.
Usage Guidelines
The Usage Guidelines tab explains what e-mail address to use to send a message to to be sent to the list, and how to subscribe and unsubscribe using the Majordomo e-mail commands.This covers all that can be done from the Control Panel.
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All of the command line examples in this User Guide must be done while logged in via SSH as the root user. See the SSH User Guide for more information if necessary. The ability to use standard Linux commands and edit files using the vi text editor is required. |
Configuration Files
The configuration files for Majordomo are here:| /var/spool/vmail/example.com/lists/ -rwxr-xr-x 1 majordomo majordomo 38 Mar 30 17:34 listname -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16595 Feb 21 22:48 listname.config -rwxr-xr-x 1 majordomo majordomo 29 Feb 21 21:52 listname.intro |
The list of subscribers is in the listname file, the list configuration is in the listname.config file, and the text from Mailing list introduction is in the listname.info file.
listname
The listname file has the list of subscribers, one per line. If you need to add a large number of users, see the next section on Adding Users.
listname.config
The listname.config file has all the mailing list configuration settings. In general, the default settings in this file are fine for the majority of users.
listname.info
The listname.info file has the text from the Mailing list introduction section from the General Tab of mailing list screen. You can update the list introduction in this file or from the Control Panel.
Adding Users
The standard way of adding subscribers is through the Subscribers tab on the main Mailing List screen for a mailing list. This is fine if you are only adding a few users at a time, but if you need to add a lot of subscribers at once, this method is too time consuming. To add a large number of subscribers at once, follow these steps.First, you need to create the file that has all your mailing list subscribers that has one e-mail address per line, and is in plain text. This file cannot be in any format that is not plain text - it cannot be in Word .doc or .docx, or Excel .xls, or Wordpad .rtf, or OpenOffice .odt, or any other format other than plain text, one e-mail address per line. (All of these programs can save files in plain text, but that is not their default setting, it has to be manually selected) Make sure the list owner’s e-mail address is in this file as the first line.
Save that file as listname.users, and upload that file to your VPS using either the File Manager in the Control Panel (if the file is under 5MB), or any other file upload tool you are comfortable with, such as WinSCP or Filezilla. See our SFTP and FTP User Guides for more information on this.
Once the file is uploaded to your VPS, connect to the VPS using SSH as the root user. This example assumes you have uploaded your file of listname.users to the /var/spool/vmail/example.com/lists directory.
| [root@example lists]# ll total 36 -rwxr-xr-x 1 majordomo majordomo 38 Mar 30 17:32 listname -rwxr-xr-x 1 majordomo majordomo 38 Mar 30 17:29 listname.back -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16595 Feb 21 22:48 listname.config -rwxr-xr-x 1 majordomo majordomo 29 Feb 21 21:52 listname.intro -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 348 Mar 30 17:32 listname.users [root@example lists]# [root@example lists]# mv listname{,.bck} [root@example lists]# cp listname.users listname [root@example lists]# ll total 40 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 348 Mar 30 17:34 listname -rwxr-xr-x 1 majordomo majordomo 38 Mar 30 17:29 listname.back -rwxr-xr-x 1 majordomo majordomo 38 Mar 30 17:32 listname.bck -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16595 Feb 21 22:48 listname.config -rwxr-xr-x 1 majordomo majordomo 29 Feb 21 21:52 listname.intro -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 348 Mar 30 17:32 listname.users [root@example lists]# chown majordomo:majordomo listname |
This backs up the original file with the subscribers (if there are any), and moves the new file with the subscribers into place, and then changes the owner and group of that file to the correct user. Now if you click on the System Tab of the Control Panel, and then navigate back to the Mailing Lists and Subscribers for this list, you will see all the new subscribers.
Links to other information
Majordomo FAQ – http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/FAQ.htmlMajordomo main site – http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/
O'Reilly book on Mailing lists that includes information on Majordomo - http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565922594/