Mailing Lists

As a SmarterMail user you may be tasked with becoming a "List Moderator". What that means is that you're the person who manages a mailing list for your organization — a company newsletter, a discussion list, a customer announcement list, etc. It's your job to configure how the list behaves, manage subscribers, manage who can post to the list and much more. If you do become a List Moderator, the Mailing Lists page in your Settings is where you go to work on those lists.

Note: Mailing lists can only be created or removed by a domain administrator, in the Accounts area of the domain's settings. As a List Moderator, you manage the lists that have been assigned to you — a banner at the top of the page reminds you of this.

When you access your Mailing Lists page, any list you moderate is displayed with the following:

List Name - The name of the mailing list. If a list has been disabled by the domain administrator, its address displays with "(Disabled)" after it.
List Moderator - The List Moderator's address. As you're managing the lists, this should be you.
Subscribers - The total number of subscribers for the mailing list.
Digest Subscribers - The total number of digest subscribers for the mailing list.

If a mailing list is ever corrupted or otherwise broken, it will appear in the list with a red warning icon next to its name, and its subscriber counts are hidden. Clicking on the list opens a window explaining that the list failed to load and that mail to it will not function, with the option to remove the mailing list. Removing the list allows the domain administrator to re-use the list name and, therefore, recreate the list or use the same list name for a different subscriber base.

If you do not want to remove the list, it IS possible it can be recovered: a system administrator would need to get a copy of mailinglist_data.json from the domain's Archived Data and either replace the existing file, or manually merge it with the existing file.

Managing Mailing Lists

As a List Moderator you have control over most of the settings for the list, or lists, you manage. To see these settings, simply click on the list you want to manage and its options will open, organized into tabs. A few things — the list's name, its enabled/disabled status, its visibility in the Global Address List, throttling, and custom field definitions — are reserved for domain administrators, but everything else is yours to run: how messages are addressed, who can post, subscriber management, digests, and the list's system messages.

For information on the tabs listed and the options available, see the information below:

Options - Configure the mailing list options and permissions, including how messages are addressed, posting rules, subscribe commands, and digest settings.
Subscribers and Digest Subscribers - Add and manage subscribers who will receive the standard mailing list postings or condensed digest emails.
Allowed Posters - Allow specific email addresses to post to the mailing list, in addition to the list's general posting rules.
Banned Posters - Prevent specific email addresses from posting to the mailing list.
Messages - Configure the header and footer for postings as well as the replies sent to listserv commands.
Custom Fields - Customize list postings with subscriber custom fields. (This tab is only visible to domain administrators; if you need a new custom field for your list, ask your domain administrator to create it.)