Overview
Recipient filters for Mailman's privacy options. Mailman will allow people from outside the list to post to the list. A list owner can set their own spam filtering options for the individual list. The Privacy Options affect who can see the list, post to the list, and view list information.
To access the Mailman Privacy Options page, you can go to the following URL (replace LISTNAMEHERE with your list's name):
- https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/admin/<LISTNAMEHERE>/privacy
Recipient Filters
List owners can deny posting to the list unless the list address is available in the To: or CC: fields of the posting.
This keeps the list address from being obscured and allows for better troubleshooting of problems with the list.
Sender Filters
The accept_these_nonmembers setting is used to list the email addresses, one per line, of those people from outside the list who are allowed to post to the list. This is useful for announcements, information, and periodic postings from people interested in sending the list information, but who are not a part of the list.
The other settings on this page are not as widely used.
Spam Filters
The UO spam-filtering system, Proofpoint, will generally filter out unwanted messages. Good subscriber management will keep spammers from infiltrating your lists.
Use these options with caution as they can deny or delete messages sent to the list.
Subscription Rules
To hide the list, set advertised to No.
- advertised should usually be set to No. This setting determines whether the list is listed on the UO Mailman homepage.
- subscribe_policy should be set to Require Approval or Confirm and approve, to keep spammers and unwanted subscribers from posting to the list.
- unsubscribe_policy should usually be set to No, to allow people subscribed to the list to leave the list if they so desire.
- ban_list is a set of email addresses, one per line, that are not allowed to subscribe to the list. If subscribe_policy is set to require list owner approval, this should not be an issue.
- private_roster configures who is allowed to view the subscription list. This should not be set to Anyone in order to protect the list subscribers from having their email addresses gathered by spammers or other non-list entities.
- obscure_addresses is another way of protecting the list subscribers. If the members of the list are viewed, their email addresses are not displayed in an Internet usable fashion.