How do I create a mailing list or distribution list?
As you might have guessed already, a room is the entity providing this functionality. You need to have at least room-aide privileges to access this feature. By default, you may want to choose public BBS-Rooms or public mailfolders for this; you may however find usecases where other roomtypes make sense too.
Citadel incorporates a fully functional listserver. It provides both single-message and digest modes, and allows self-service subscribe/unsubscribe via Webcit, and Aide controlled subscription. Multiple email addresses can be added at once; You also can choose email addresses from all your addressbooks.
The administration screens in WebCit (Advanced →Advanced room commands → Edit or delete this room → Mailing list service) provide the most intuitive way of configuring and managing a list.
This screen offers also the ability to…
- add system global mail aliases for this room; for the way in, multiple addresses may be chosen; default is room_<the roomname>@yourcitadel.org
- choose the alias which should be used as “from-address” for this room when it sends mails to subscribers
- Add Recipients in digest (one mail per day) mode
- Add Recipients (each mail)
- Choose message post policy
- “Allow non-subscribers to mail to this room.” → anybody can send mail to this room. Also usefull if you want to run a shared mailbox ala info@; else messages to all of the subscribed recipients may be sent from:
- every local user
- network users from other citadels
- “Room post publication needs Admin permission.” → a newsleter multicast list - the room aide can send mails to a list of recipients, they may not answer.
- “Allow self-service subscribe/unsubscribe requests.” → users may choose to subscribe / unsubscribe via webinterface; the URL you should propagate i.e. on your public website follows in the next line.
- participate in other mailinglists; you may use this to bridge a room to a remote mailinglist.
You can do most of this from the text mode client as well.