Our mailing list software is Great Circle's Majordomo, one of the most popular mailing list managers out there. A mailing list hosted by Majordomo is administered almost entirely by email. You email a message to Majordomo, Majordomo then emails you back the results. Majordomo is pretty quick about it, too, usually answering requests within a few minutes.

To talk to Humboldt Internet's Majordomo, send an email message to majordomo@humboldt1.com The body of the message should contain commands for Majordomo, one command per line. There are really only two commands you need to know:

If your email has a signature or other text, you should put end as the last command or Majordomo will think that your signature is more commands. This won't hurt anything, but you'll see annoying Command not recognized messages in the reply when Majordomo tries to process your signature as if it were commands and you'll get something like this:

Some Examples

If I want to subscribe to a mailing list named music-discussion, I'd send a message to majordomo@humboldt1.com and the message would be just the words subscribe music-discussion

If I later decide that I don't want to be on the mailing list any more, I'd send a message to majordomo@humboldt1.com and the message would be unsubscribe music-discussion

If I can't recall the name of the mailing list, I'd send the word lists to majordomo@humboldt1.com

Confirming Your Subscription

Some mailing lists require that you verify your subscription request. This is to keep someone else from subscribing you to a mailing list without your knowledge. After you send the subscribe command, you may get back a message that you need to be authenticated, and you'll be given a line like the following:

To finish subscribing to the mailing list, send a message back to majordomo@humboldt1.com with just that one line in it. It's usually easiest to create a new email message to Majordomo and just copy-n-paste that one line into the message.

Sending Mail to the List

To send email to a mailing list, just send it to LISTNAME@humboldt1.com, where LISTNAME is the name of the mailing list. For example, if the name of the mailing list is music-discussion, send email to music-discussion@humboldt1.com and it'll be received by everybody who is subscribed to that mailing list.

Conversely, the name of the mailing list (for use in the subscribe and unsubscribe commands) is the first part of the mailing list's email address. If the email address of the list is music-discussion@humboldt1.com, then the mailing list name for subscribe and unsubscribe requests is music-discussion.

Contacting a Mailing List Supervisor

Every mailing list has a supervisor. The mailing list supervisor is the person who's responsible for approving subscribe and unsubscribe requests, and is also a person whom people can reach if they have general questions beyond the scope of the mailing list. Because most items that get directed to the list supervisor aren't technical issues about the mailing list, this is usually not somebody at Humboldt Internet.

If you want to reach the manager, owner, or supervisor of the mailing list, add the word -owner to the mailing list's name, such as music-discussion-owner@humboldt1.com

Before contacting Humboldt Internet support about a mailing list, try contacting the supervisor for that mailing list. Since we don't supervise the mailing lists, we usually can't help you with questions or problems that don't involve the Majordomo system itself. If necessary, the mailing list's supervisor will contact Humboldt Internet support.

Approving Subscription Requests

This section is only for mailing list supervisors. A moderated subscription mailing list is a mailing list in which people need to be approved by the list supervisor before they can subscribe to the list. To subscribe, a person emails Majordomo the subscription request, same as always. They'll get back a response that their request has been passed on to the manager.

The manager will receive a message asking them to approve the subscription. To aprove, the manager would send Majordomo a message like the following:

Where LIST and PASSWORD are the name of the mailing list and the password for that list, and SUBSCRIBER_NAME and SUBSCRIBER_ADDRESS are the name and of the person trying to subscribe. It's usually easiest to create a new mail message to Majordomo and to copy-n-paste the commands that Majordomo sends.

If you supervise a mailing list and would like to enable or disable the moderated subscription feature, contact Humboldt Internet support.