Pre-approving with majordomo

[rogersjr]

I wish to use Majordomo to run a moderated mailing list so that only the moderator can send e-mails to the list.

The control panel allows yes to be selected for Moderate. I am not sure what should be placed in the Moderator field.

To send pre-approved mail to a moderated list requires that Approval: password is placed in the first line of the message. Some instructions also state that the To: address should be placed below the approved instruction.

Some instruction state that a blank line must follow, others that the next line should not be blank.

No matter what combination that I use I cannot pre-approve a message to the list. They either diappear or are bounced back.

Can anyone explain how I can do this?

 

[nobaloney]

To preapprove a message to a moderated majordomo list either the approval request must either be in the headers, or in the first line below the headers, followed by a blank line.

The latter location (first line below the headers, followed by a blank line) only works for text (not html or rtf) emails.

Here are some majordomo resources:

The majordomo "list owner info" file

The majordomo website

The "majordomo-users" mailing list

Jeff

 

[rogersjr]

As my e-mails are html I now know why adding the approval password to the body of the e-mail does not work. Thanks for explaining that.

With regard to placing the approval request in the headers, how is this done? Selecting "View - All headers" only displays the To, From, Cc, Bcc and Subject headers in Outlook Express. Is there another header that I have yet to discover?

I have tried using the header field in the control panel which presumably would allow anyone to sent messages to the list. In any case this method does not work.

Thanks again for your help.

 

[nobaloney]

You'd have to have the abiity to add a new header.

I don't know if OE gives you this ability or not.

What do you mean by "header field in the control panel"?

Jeff

 

[rogersjr]

see the screenprints at

control panel 1

and

control panel 2

 

[nobaloney]

Thanks for refreshing my memory.

Here's the documentation for message headers:

# message_headers [string_array] (undef) <resend,digest>
# These headers will be appended to the headers of the posted
# message. The text is expanded before being used. The following
# expansion tokens are defined: $LIST - the name of the current
# list, $SENDER - the sender as taken from the from line, $VERSION,
# the version of majordomo.

To me that means it won't work because the message never reaches that stage (posted) before it's bounced for approval.

Majordomo was designed before HTML email was invented. It's not meant to be used for sending HTML email. It will probably have problems when used with HTML email.

Jeff

 

[rogersjr]

Thanks.

Sending html e-mail works fine. I just need to turn off moderation before sending the newsletter and then turn moderation back on.

 

[nobaloney]

I've been thinking about it, and I think that html email will affect both archives and digests. If you don't use either, I don't think majordomo will be affected by, or affect, html emails.

That said, if all you're doing is announcement lists, all in html, there are probably some better solutions out there. Perhaps even free (as in beer) ones.

Jeff

 

[rogersjr]

I have been using MyMail for newsletters but more and more newsletters were being blocked, some as spam but others just did not make it.

I used majordomo out of desperation for a quick fix and quite a few people started getting newsletters that had not got through for quite a while.

Although majordomo is very basic it does work. Setting up a new script is time consuming and it is difficult to know who is not getting the newsletters.