Mailing Lists

You are planning to run a community website with many members and need to send them regular notifications about important events, or intend to manage an e-commerce store whose potential or existing customers you wish to inform about special promo campaigns? What you definitely need here is a mailing list service.





Table of contents

• What is a Mailing List?
• How to create a Mailing list
• How to use the Majordomo mailing list
• How to subscribe to a mailing list
• How to unsubscribe from a mailing list
• How to send a message to a mailing list
• Other useful Majordomo commands

What is a Mailing List?

What does a mailing list represent actually? This is a list of e-mail addresses used by an individual or an organization to send certain messages (routine notifications about events, notifications or commercial emails about discounts, special sales campaigns) to multiple recipients. Those email addresses can be reached by sending only one email to the main mail list address. An email can only be sent to people who have given their consent to participate in an email list by sending a 'subscribe to' email to the main mailing list address. A 'mailing list' also refers to the group of subscribers to such a list.

How to create a Mailing list

The mailing list software coming with the web hosting packages offered by NTC Hosting is Majordomo - an easy-to-use automatic mail list manager. You only need to pass through a few quick steps before putting it into action. Simply type the mailing list address from where the newsletters will be sent, specify the desired mailing list control panel access password, add a valid admin email address (POP3/IMAP E-mail Accounts, Webmail account) and click on the Create Mailing List button.

How to use the Majordomo mailing list

Majordomo is mailing list software which provides automated, remote management of mailing lists. All you need is an Internet connection. All commands are sent to Majordomo via email. So let's check the commands used to manage Majordomo's basic features:

How to subscribe to a mailing list

Once you've created a Majordomo managed mailing list using the NTC Hosting Control Panel, you can easily subscribe an email to the list. For our example we will use the mailing list example@my-best-domain.com.

To subscribe to the Majordomo managed mailing list example@my-best-domain.com, you need to send an email message to the address majordomo@my-best-domain.com with the following command in the body of the message:

An example of how to subscribe to a Majordomo mailing list

This will subscribe the account from which you send the message to the mailing list. To subscribe other e-mail accounts (not the one from which you send the message) to your Majordomo mailing list, you need to use the command below:

An example of how to subscribe another mail to a Majordomo mailing list

How to unsubscribe from a mailing list

If you decide to unsubscribe form a Majordomo managed mailing list, it is important to note that sending a message like “please unsubscribe me”, or similar, won't work. The unsubscription process is as easy as the subscription, but a specific command needs to be sent to majordomo@ + the mailing list’s domain name. In our example (example@my-best-domain.com) the command should be sent to majordomo@my-best-domain.com.

An example of how to unsubscribe from a Majordomo mailing list

The command above will unsubscribe the email address from which you send the Majordomo's command. If you need to unsubscribe another mailbox you'll need to send a message with the following content:

An example of how to unsubscribe another email from a Majordomo mailing list

How to send a message to a mailing list

To send an email to all the members of the mailing list example@my-best.domain.com you need just to post the message to the mailing list’s email example@my-best.domain.com. Then the Majordomo software will handle your message and will automatically send it to all the subscribers to the list.

Other useful Majordomo commands

• Who - Using the 'who' command, the Majordomo mailing list's users can view the exact email with which they are subscribed to the list. This command is useful in case the client is subscribed to the mailing list example@my-best.domain.com, but because of using forwarding, or for other reasons, doesn't know the exact address with which he/she is subscribed. In such a case the subscribed member just needs to send the following command to majordomo@my-best-domain.com
  
  

  An example of how to use the 'who' command in Majordomo

  who example

• Which - If you are using an email address for receiving messages from several mailing lists at the same domain. For example, you are subscribed with the mailbox mail@my-ntc-domain.com to the mailing lists example@my-best.domain.com and test@my-best.domain.com. You can view a list of the mailing lists by sending the following command to majordomo@my-best-domain.com
  
  

  An example of how to use the 'which' command in Majordomo

  which mail@my-ntc-domain.com

• Help - The 'help' command will send back to you all the commands accepted by Majordomo with detailed descriptions. For example, if you need to check what other commands might be available on the Majordomo server running my-best-domain.com, you need to send a message to majordomo@my-best-domain.com with the command below:
  
  

  An example of how to use the 'help' command in Majordomo

  help

With any of the hosting packages that we, at NTC Hosting, are offering, you get a Majordomo mailing list installation with many options for full control over your e-mail notification campaigns. You can set up your mailing list easily using the Mailing lists section of our Web Hosting Control Panel's Email Manager. Also, our mailing list system can be simply integrated for keeping in touch with your community members or customers of your Joomla, WordPress or osCommerce based website.