Mailing lists
One address that reaches everybody. You write to
Written for: Customer, Reseller, Administrator
One address that reaches everybody. You write to newsletter@yourdomain.com and every member gets it — without keeping a list of addresses in your mail program, and without your customers seeing each other's addresses.
Useful for a newsletter, a team, a club or a group of customers.
What it is not: a newsletter system with templates, statistics and open rates. That comes later as a separate module. This is the classic mailing list: write to one address, everybody reads along.
Creating a list
Open the account, go to Email and pick the domain at the top. Below the mailboxes and the forwarders is the Mailing lists block with a Create a mailing list button.
There are four things to fill in:
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | the address becomes name@yourdomain.com |
| Description | what the list is for; only visible in the panel |
| Who may post | see the table below |
| Moderators | the addresses told when something is waiting |
The same thing from the command line:
corectl maillist add newsletter@yourdomain.com \
--description "Monthly newsletter" \
--moderators anna@yourdomain.com[corecp] mailing list newsletter@yourdomain.com created
[corecp] posting: members post directly; other senders wait for a moderator
[corecp] members subscribe themselves by mailing newsletter+subscribe@yourdomain.comA list always needs a moderator. That address receives the list's administrative mail, and messages that cannot be delivered come back there. If you leave it empty, the server takes the first mailbox on the domain.
Who may post?
| Choice | What happens |
|---|---|
| Anyone | every sender reaches every member straight away |
| Members only | a message from anybody else is refused, and the sender is told |
| Members directly, others moderated | members post at once, anybody else waits for approval — the default |
| Everything moderated | every message waits, including a member's |
The default is deliberate: anyone turns your list into a relay for spam, and members only leaves a customer who politely asked a question standing at a closed door without you ever knowing.
Members
Open the list (click the row) and go to the Members tab. There you add somebody, or take them off.
People can also subscribe and unsubscribe themselves, which is usually nicer. Under Settings are the two addresses you can put in your newsletter or on your website:
newsletter+subscribe@yourdomain.com
newsletter+unsubscribe@yourdomain.comAnybody writing to those is in or out immediately — you do not have to do anything, and the panel shows it the next time you look. The membership is not kept twice: the panel simply reads what the list software itself maintains, so there is only one truth.
corectl maillist subscribe newsletter@yourdomain.com customer@customer.com
corectl maillist members newsletter@yourdomain.comanna@yourdomain.com
customer@customer.comApproving messages
With the list on members directly, others moderated (or on everything moderated), messages from outside land in a queue. You see that in two places: the Waiting column of the list, and the Moderation tab inside it. The moderators are told by mail as well.
Per message you see the sender, the subject and when it arrived — enough to judge it. Then you choose:
- Approve — the message goes to every member after all.
- Discard — the message disappears.
Note: discarding tells the sender nothing. If somebody deserves an answer, write it yourself. That is a deliberate choice: an automatic refusal to an address you do not know is exactly what spammers use to find out whether an address exists.
corectl maillist moderation newsletter@yourdomain.comID FROM SUBJECT
4245c5ce59b20780 new.customer@example.com [newsletter] Question about deliverycorectl maillist approve newsletter@yourdomain.com 4245c5ce59b20780Digest
Switch Offer a digest on and members can choose one message with everything in it instead of separate mails. You decide how often that is — 24 hours means once a day.
With the digest off, a member cannot switch themselves to one either. A setting that applies to you but not to your members is not a setting.
Subject prefix
By default every message gets [name] in front of the subject, so a reader can see at a glance that it came from the list and can filter on it in their mail program. You can change it or empty it under Settings.
Removing a list
On the Danger zone tab. The address stops working. Members and archive are kept unless you tick the box to throw those away as well — and that cannot be undone.
See also
- Setting up email — mailboxes, aliases and forwarding addresses.
- Where your email went — why a message did or did not arrive.