Now that you have reviewed your list and manipulated it, you probably have questions, concerns, and ideas on how to use the many different features of LISTSERV. List owners can be very involved with their lists, or can take a “back seat” and let their subscribers and/or editors and moderators do most of the posting. List owners are responsible for setting the rules and enforcing the policies of the list, so although you may not actively participate in posting messages, you do have a very important role.
A list owner is entrusted with its members’ personal information (email address and name), and this carries certain responsibilities with regards to ensuring privacy and security.
You must determine what level of security is most appropriate for your list. For example, a closed family list, where all members know each other personally may be set to
Review=Private (any list member may get the list of all subscribed addresses), but any list with subscriptions open to the public should be set to
Review=Owners. A hobby discussion list may operate with relaxed security and deal with transgressions as they occur, but a commercial newsletter must have very tight security, as any breach will reflect poorly on the company’s reputation. On an open discussion list, subscribers are aware that the discussion may sometimes stray off-topic, whereas on a moderated list they expect that you will exercise more control over what gets posted. On a one-way list, subscribers will hold you responsible for every posting.
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Receive and review all mail sent to the listname-request address. This address is publicized as the way to get in touch with the list owner when a subscriber or potential subscriber requires assistance. When LISTSERV receives mail at this address, it forwards it to all “non-quiet” list owners. List owners must accept this mail, as it might represent signoff requests from subscribers who are unable to remove themselves on their own. Ignoring such requests would make you a spammer. Unfortunately, it also means that some spam can be sent to list owners through LISTSERV. It is irresponsible to send complaints to your LISTSERV provider and your LISTSERV site’s upstream provider about spam sent through the listname-request, as it will only damage your own access to the list as well as your subscribers’ and those of other lists on the same server, without affecting the original spammer in any way.
LISTSERV is a very feature-rich application. In this Introductory guide, we have striven to keep the explanations as simple as possible while keeping them accurate. We did not want to sacrifice some of the more complex information that, in our experience, have found to be useful to new list owners.
As you become more familiar with using LISTSERV, you will naturally want to take advantage of the many other features contained within the program. LISTSERV can be linked to a database and use database fields to create messages customized to each individual subscriber. Subscriber demographics or other information stored in the database can be systematically selected for the creation of highly personalized and targeted messages.
Another useful but complex feature is LISTSERV’s system for handling errors with problematic email deliveries called “bounces”. LISTSERV automatically processes and decodes the majority of the common error bounces (undeliverable messages returned to the sender). The list owner and LISTSERV maintainer have the flexibility to define the parameters of the bounce handling. For instance, LISTSERV can be set to remove a subscriber from a list after a specified number of messages are bounced.
L-Soft’s Web site, http://www.lsoft.com has links to a glossary, FAQs, technical white papers, and downloadable user’s manuals. Click on the INFO link on L-Soft’s home page to access these resources.
Most LISTSERV sites provide an email address for assistance. If you do not know the email address to use for your LISTSERV site, you can always reach the LISTSERV Site Maintainer at listserv-request@listserv-server where listserv-server is the domain name of the LISTSERV server (for example: listserv-request@listserv.example.com).
The LISTSERV-LITE public list is the support channel for L Soft's LISTSERV Lite product. LISTSERV Lite offers an extremely stable but competitively priced (and in some cases, free) alternative for sites with small workloads.
For technical material on the protocols for email, see the many “Request for Comments” documents (RFCs) available on the Web. These documents explain the rules that email and other software products must follow in order to work cooperatively with each other on the Internet. Understanding the rules is often helpful for troubleshooting problems.
