Majordomo List Administrator's Information

Your mailing list is being served by an automated mailing list manager that responds to commands emailed to the majordomo@bga.com. This page has all the details of how to manage your list remotely using Majordomo. If you have any questions, refer them to majordom-owner@bga.com.

There's a lot of info here, so please read this completely and carefully, and save it for future reference. If you have any questions, you should send them to the Majordomo-Owner address above.

As soon as possible, please issue a "newinfo" command for your list (see below) to create the file that someone will receive when they join or ask about your list.

You can issue a "who" command for your list to see who's already on your list. You may or may not already be subscribed to your own list.

The Gory Details

Your mailing list is managed by an automated mailing list management program called Majordomo. Majordomo should free you from dealing with most of the administrivia usually associated with running mailing lists (adding users, dropping users, etc.).

To submit something to your list, you (or anybody else) should simply mail it to your list as your-list-name@bga.com. If you have a custom domain name for your list, you may substitute this for bga.com.

If somebody sends something to list request address shown above (which is the traditional Internet way of being added to a mailing list), they'll get back a message telling them how to use Majordomo for routine requests, and how to contact you if they need to speak to a human being.

To be added to your list, a user simply sends a message of the form

subscribe your-list-name

by email to majordomo@bga.com .

Majordomo understands several commands, and is not limited to a single command per message (it will process commands until reaching end-of-message or the command "end"). The command "help" will tell you about all the other commands.

Actually, it won't tell you about all the other commands that Majordomo understands. There are several commands there for use by list owners such as yourself, which are not advertised to the public. All of these commands are password-protected on a list-by-list basis, but anyone with a valid list/password combination can invoke these commands. This is not exactly high-tech security, but it's more intended to keep annoyance to a minimum than to be foolproof.

The "documented" commands which Majordomo understands and which are for everyone to use are:


    subscribe <list> [<address>]
    unsubscribe <list> [<address>]
    which [<address>]
    who <list>
    info <list>
    index <list>
    get <list>
    lists
    help
    end

You can get detailed explanations of all of these by asking for "help" from Majordomo.

The "undocumented" commands for use by list owners are:

approve <passwd> {subscribe|unsubscribe} <list> [<address>]: This is so that you can approve subscription or unsubscription actions that need approval by the list owner. Note that this is just a standard "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" command prefixed with "approve <password>" (where you substitute the password for your list, which is listed above, for "<password>").
passwd <list> <old_passwd> <new_passwd>: This is so you can change the password for your list, if you desire.
newinfo <list> <password>: This is so that you can replace the information file that people get when they do "info <list>" or "subscribe <list>". It reads everything after the "newinfo" command to end-of-message or the word "EOF" on a line by itself as the new info for the list.
config <list> <password>: retrieve a self-documenting configuration file for the list <list>. The <password> can be the password contained in the file <listname>.passwd or the admin_password in the configuration file.
newconfig <list> <password>: Validates and installs a new configuration file. It reads everything after the "newconfig" command to end-of-message or the word "EOF" on a line by itself as the new info for the list. The config file is expected to be a complete config file as returned by "config". Incremental changing of the config file is not yet supported. As soon as the config file is validated and installed its settings are available for use. This is useful to remember if you have multiple commands in your mail message since they will be subject to the settings of the new config file. If there is an error in the config file (incorrect value...), the config file will not be accepted and the error message identifying the problem line(s) will be returned to the sender. Note that only the error messages are returned to the sender not the entire config file, so it would be a good idea to keep a copy of your outgoing email message.
writeconfig <list> <password>: Write a new config file in standard form. Writeconfig forces a rewrite of the config file with all comments and default values in place. It is useful to use after an upgrade of majordomo since it will add the new keywords for people to change. It also updates the documentation in the file if that has changed.
mkdigest <digest list name> <password>: Generate a digest.

Configuring Your List

You should retrieve the configuration file for your list. To do this, send an email message to the majordomo address listed at the top of this form. The contents of this message should be:

config <List name> <List password>

Where <ListName> <List password> are given at the top of the form. You will receive a config file that can be used to change the operation of your list. If the information at the top of this form shows that resend is being used, you want to configure the majordomo and resend subsystems. Otherwise you only have to configure those items that are associated with the majordomo system.

The configuration file is meant to be self documenting. Once you have completed all of the changes to the config file, You should use the newconfig command (described above) to put a new configuration file in place.

If you have a digest version of your list, you should retrieve the config file for the digest as well using:

config <Digest List Name> <Digest list password>

and configure the parameters for the digest and majordomo subsystems.

Regular Expressions

In order to make majordomo do all of its tricks, a rudimentary knowledge of perl style regular expressions is needed. A regular expression is a concise way of expressing a pattern in a series of characters. The full power of regular expressions can make some difficult tasks quite easy, but we will only brush the surface here.

Here is a sample regular expression:

/cs\.umb\.edu/

This matches the following strings:


cs.umb.edu
foo.cs.umb.edu
user@foo.cs.umb.edu
users%foo.cs.umb.edu@greatcircle.com

Basically any string that contains "cs.umb.edu" will be matched by the above regular expression. One thing you may note, is that the periods are preceded with a backslash. The reason for this is that the period has a special meaning in a regular expression. In order to get the period to represent itself, its special meaning is turned off with a '\'. Let's try a more difficult regular expression:

/rouilj@.*cs\.umb\.edu/

This matches:


rouilj@cs.umb.edu
rouilj@terminus.cs.umb.edu
arouilj@terminus.cs.umb.edu@greatcircle.com

but it doesn't match


rouilj@umb.edu
brent@cs.umb.edu

The two characters '.*' means "0 or more characters," so any string that has "rouilj@" followed by 0 or more characters followed by "cs.umb.edu" will be matched. Each character in the '.*' string has a special meaning. The period represents any character, while the * means zero or more. When put together, '.*' represents zero or more of any character.

There are two more characters that match the start and end of a string. Let's consider:

/^rouilj@.*cs\.umb\.edu$/

This matches


rouilj@cs.umb.edu
rouilj@terminus.cs.umb.edu

but it doesn't match


arouilj@terminus.cs.umb.edu@greatcircle.com

for two reasons. The '^' symbol just after the starting '/' matches the beginning of the string. Since "arouilj..." doesn't start with 'r', the match fails. The '$' sign just before the final '/' says that the string must end after "cs.umb.edu" Since "....com" doesn't match "cs.umb.edu", the match fails in a second way. In perl style regular expressions, the special meaning of any symbol can be eliminated by preceeding the symbol with a '\' as was done with the periods above.

The regular expression:

/.*/

matches everything, but:

/.\*rouilj/

matches "*rouilj" with any character before the * (e.g. "a*rouilj", "s*rouilj", ".*rouilj". If there is no character before the *, (e.g. just "*rouilj") then the match will fail. To be on the safe side put a '\' in front of any characters in the regular expressions that are not numbers or letters. In order to put a '/' into the regular expression, the same rule holds: precede it with a '\'. Thus: /\/CO\=US/ matches "/CO=US" and may be a useful regular expression to those of you who need to deal with X.400 addresses. Approval When Majordomo requests your approval for something, it sends you a message that includes a template of the approval message; if you concur, you simply need to replace "PASSWORD" in the template with your list password, and send the template line back to Majordomo. The requests for approval that Majordomo generates all start with "APPROVE" in the "Subject:" line. You aren't limited to approving only things to Majordomo requests approval for. You can approve any "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" request, regardless of whether Majordomo has requested this approval, with an "approve" command. Thus, you can subscribe or unsubscribe people from your list without them having to send anything to Majordomo; just send an appropriate "approve PASSWORD subscribe LIST ADDRESS" or "approve PASSWORD unsubscribe LIST ADDRESS" command off to Majordomo. If you read your mail on a UNIX system and have "perl" available (try "perl -v" and see if it tells you about perl; if it gives you a "command not found" message instead, then you don't have perl on your machine), there is a program called "approve" available to automate the approval process; contact your Majordomo-Owner at the address listed above for a copy of the program. Bounced Messages Majordomo may bounce certain messages that people attempt to post to your mailing list. These messages may be bounced because they appear to be administrative requests (i.e., someone mailed a request to subscribe or unsubscribe to the posting address rather than to Majordomo or to the -request address), because they are too long, or for any of a number of other reasons. Majordomo will forward these messages to you in another message whose subject line begins with the word "BOUNCE"; the subject line will also indicate the name of the list the message was bounced from (in case you manage more than one list) and the reason the message was bounced. If you decide that the message is OK and should not have been bounced, then you can cause Majordomo to post it anyway by sending the message back to the posting address (NOT to the Majordomo address) with a special "Approved: password" header. To do this, follow these instructions: Save the original message (the body of the message you received from Majordomo) in a file. Edit the file to insert a line that says "Approved: password" (where "password" is the password for your list) at the top, before the original message. Send this edited file back to the posting address for your list (NOT to Majordomo). This time around, Majordomo will notice the "Approved:" line and check it against your list password. If it matches, Majordomo will strip off the header of your message and the "Approved:" line (leaving just the original message), and send the original message on through. The "approve" program mentioned above in the section on approving Majordomo requests can also approve bounced messages for posting. You just save the whole message from Majordomo in a file, and say "approve file" (or pipe the message to the "approve" program as standard input), and the "approve" program does the rest. Moderation If your list is moderated, (the moderate parameter in the config file is yes) then messages without an "Approved:" line are bounced, just as described above. To cause them to be posted to the list, you add a valid "Approved:" line and send them back, just as described above. Again, if you're able to use it, the "approve" program automates all this. If you have any questions about all of this, send them to the Majordomo-owner@bga.com.