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Owner's Introduction - ezmlm and ezmlm-idx Manual

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3.1 Introduction

This chapter tells you how to deal with common problems and introduces you to the power and technical aspects of ezmlm/idx. If you want to customize your list, please use the man pages and FAQ included in the ezmlm and ezmlm-idx packages (see More Information).

As the owner of an ezmlm list you will appreciate the high degree of speed and automation of ezmlm. Even with large numbers of subscribers, the parallelism of ezmlm/qmail results in rapid delivery of the message to the subscribers. This makes it easy to have discussions among list members. With slower list managers the discussion is often limited to a small set of users who send mail on the topic to each other, ‘Cc:ing’ the message to the list. When the other subscribers receive the message, the discussion is way past this point

Features that require ezmlm-idx are marked “(*)”. Features that require ezmlm-idx version 7 are marked “(*7)”.

ezmlm -subscribe and -unsubscribe commands result in a handshake which essentially eliminates the possibility of people other than the user (and possibly remote administrators) adding or removing the user's address from the list.

For the list ‘mailinglist@example.org’, mail to the ‘mailinglist-help@example.org’ address returns a message with all the relevant ezmlm commands for subscription and message archive related functions. Archive access is simple and powerful.

Together these features make it very easy to set up and manage an ezmlm mailing list. The rare messages to the list-owner address (‘mailinglist-owner@example.org’, in the example) are usually due to subscribers who have subscribed under one address, and now use another. Even they can (un)subscribe without owner intervention, but some subscribers may be unable/unwilling to read the ezmlm help message and follow the instructions therein.