List Maintenance Part 2 - Daily Use
Everyone who has a list will be responsible for the tasks concerning the list.
There are two groups of people who can moderate a list, those listed as administers (also know as owners) and those listed as moderators; more information about roles can be found at http://www.rose-hulman.edu/TSC/services/email/mailing_lists/mailman/user_roles/.
Moderation requests can be sorted into two main categories; membership, requests and held messages. We have already covered membership here: http://www.rose-hulman.edu/TSC/services/mailman/list_maintenance/, so we will not cover that again in this tutorial except to say that Mailman will e-mail moderators about users who's subscriptions are pending.
Held Messages
Held messages are messages that for some reason or another violated your mailing list's rules and need to be approved before sending. By default Mailman discards any held messages over three days old so it is important to deal with held messages quickly (if you feel they should be sent). There are several common reasons why a message could be held; the message is larger than the specified limit, the message is from someone that is not on the list, or emergency moderation is turned on (all messages are automatically held). With any of the different types of held messages there is a common set of options available to the list moderator. A moderator can either ignore the message for the specified number of days causing it to be deleted; defer the message, which causes it to be held until a later date; accept the message which will cause the message to be sent to the list; reject the message which will cause the message to be rejected and, if the option is set, will notify the sender that his/her message has been rejected, or discard the message which will delete the message without sending a rejection notice. Of these you would normally only select discard if the message was known spam. Below is an example of a message that is both to large for the list was sent by a user not on the list.
Figure 1 - Held Message Options
It is important to remember to click on one of the Submit All Data Buttons before leaving the page you are working on or all of your changes will be lost.
The last thing that is important to notice about a message held because the sender was not on the mailing list is that the moderator is given the option to add or ban the user from the list. Normally you would only choose to add a user if you know who it is or ban them if you think they are spammers. Lastly, if you, as a moderator, do not know what to do with a message you can select the Preserve message for the site administrator option on the message and then only the list administrator will be able to deal with the held message.
