OpenBSD Mailing List Server

                           Auxiliary Subscriber Lists

Every mailing list has a collection of e-mail addresses which receive
the messages that are posted to the list.  In some situations, other
collections of addresses may be needed for a mailing list.  These other
collections are called auxiliary subscriber lists, or "auxlists" or
"sublists" for short.  For example, if there are several moderators,
their addresses could be kept in a sublist, and if only a select group
of people are allowed to post messages to a mailing list, their
addresses could be kept in a sublist.  

Sublists are different from regular subscriber lists in that no record
is kept of the sublist participants in Majordomo's central registry.
This means that the "show" command will never tell you to which sublists
you are subscribed.  This invisibility is useful because some sublists
are not meant to be known to the public.  For instance, a list owner
might keep a sublist of banned addresses, people who are excluded from
participating in the list.

Auxiliary lists follow the same naming conventions as fully-fledged
Majordomo lists.  Names are case-insensitive, and may only consist of
letters, digits, underscores, periods, or hyphens.

There are several ways in which auxiliary lists are useful.  In the
following examples, we will work with a mailing list called "cabbage"
and sublists called "broccoli," "kohlrabi," and "kale."  The list is
hosted at the example.net domain.

By default, an administrative password is required to see or change the
members of an auxiliary list.  There are several ways to make sublists
more open, which will be illustrated below.

To refer to a sublist in a majordomo command, it is necessary to use a
special notation, the main list and the sublist must be separated by a
colon (":").  For example, the kale sublist of the cabbage list would be
referred to as

  cabbage:kale 

and the command to add the address "lacinato@example.com" to the kale
sublist would be

  subscribe cabbage:kale lacinato@example.com

Other familiar commands follow the same pattern:

  unsubscribe cabbage:broccoli
  who-enhanced cabbage:kale
  set cabbage:kohlrabi nomail vienna@example.net

A sublist can be created by subscribing an e-mail address to it, or
it can be created explicitly using the "sublist-create" command, for
example:

  sublist-create cabbage:sprout

Similarly, the "sublist-destroy" command can be used to destroy a
sublist, for example:

  sublist-destroy cabbage:sprout  

Auxiliary lists can be indicated in the access rules.  For example, the
following rule allows members of the kale sublist to see the other
members of the sublist:

  who
  allow
  @kale AND $sublist=kale

In plain language, this says "allow people who are members of the kale
sublist to use the who command, but only if they are asking to view the
roster of the kale sublist."

It is also possible to post messages to a sublist, but first the
following steps must be taken:

* The "auxiliary" alias must be present in the "aliases" configuration
  setting.

* The name of the sublist must be included in the "sublists" configuration
  setting.

* A site administrator must run the "createlist-regen" command to
  create the mail aliases for the sublist, after the "sublists" setting
  has been changed.

Once these steps are finished, the address of the sublist will be a
hyphenated form of the main list address.  In our example, the
cabbage:kohlrabi sublist would have an address of

  cabbage-kohlrabi@example.net

Archives are kept of all sublist posts, if the main list has an archive
directory.  Messages posted during August, 2000, to the cabbage:kale
sublist would be available through the archive command:

  archive-index cabbage kale.200008
  
Personal settings like "nomail" and "replyto" are honored by sublists,
but digests are not available.  

When a message is posted to a sublist, it uses the same access
restrictions as the main subscriber list.  If a mailing list is
moderated, its sublists will be moderated also, unless the list owner
reconfigures the settings.  The following access rule allows any member
of the kohlrabi sublist to post messages to that sublist.

  post
  allow
  @kohlrabi AND $sublist=kohlrabi

Any sublist that appears in the "sublists" setting is considered public,
whether or not messages can be posted to it.  The "lists-aux" command
can be used to display the public sublists of a mailing list.  For
example, the following command will display the public sublists of the
cabbage mailing list:

  lists-aux cabbage

See "help lists" for more information.

Auxiliary lists play an important role in list moderation.  In the
access rules, it is possible to specify a moderator group that will be
consulted when a request requires approval.  Moderator groups are the
same as auxiliary lists.  The special "moderators" auxiliary list can be
used instead of the "moderators" configuration setting to store the
addresses of the default moderators.  The advantage of this approach is
that moderators can use "nomail" and other subscriber settings if they
wish to stop moderating the list temporarily.

Auxiliary lists are also used by the "restrict_post" setting to control
who is allowed to post messages to the mailing list.

See Also:
   help admin
   help configset_access_rules
   help configset_aliases
   help configset_moderators
   help configset_restrict_post
   help configset_sublists
   help lists
   help set
   help subscribe
   help sublist
   help unsubscribe
   help who

This is the "auxiliary_list" help document for 
Majordomo 2, version 0.1201103110.

For a list of all help documents, send the following command:
   help topics
in the body of a message to majordomo@openbsd.org.

For assistance, please contact the openbsd.org administrators.

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