CUIT supports Majordomo mailing lists for purposes related to schools and departments, recognized student groups, and research interests of faculty. The list owner must be affiliated with Columbia.

The list owner is responsible for following up email from people needing help with the list and email from majordomo itself reporting problems, and for adherence to CUIT and university policies and regulations. To do this, list owner must subscribe to the list and must check email regularly. Typical problems are people asking how to subscribe or unsubscribe, majordomo reporting an address not accepting mail, majordomo bouncing a message not meeting requirements (such as not from a subscriber, or too long), or flame wars between subscribers.

Optionally, a list can be restricted, so that subscribing requires list owner's approval, or so that articles sent to the list must pass through a moderator for approval.

Note: lists based on student registration, such as lists of students in a class or program, are protected under federal regulations (FERPA). To meet security guidelines, such lists must be handled with Listserv on Administrative Information Services's host CUVMC. For information, send mail to infoline@columbia.edu. The lists can be generated from registration data. Another way to send mail to students in a class is to use CourseWorks.

Majordomo functions

• send a help command for information
• send subscribe and unsubscribe commands
• send articles to be re-sent to the subscribers on the list
• send commands to get archives and indexes of archives, if any
• send commands to see who is on a list

List owners get a document describing how they can send commands on behalf of other people, and how they can change many configuration options. Normally, anyone can subscribe to a list and anyone can send mail to a list. Typical customizations include:

• Subscription approval. Subscribe messages can be sent to the list owner for review. Set by list owner with the config file. Change the variable subscribe_policy.

• Moderation. Articles for the subscribers can be sent to the list owner for review. Set by list owner with the config file. Change the variable moderate.

• Restricting posting. Sender can be checked, so articles from subscribers go to the list while others are sent to the list owner for review. Set by list owner with the config file. Change the variable restrict_post and probably also mungedomain.

• Archive. A copy of each article is kept in an archive, and can be retrieved by users. Archiving must be set up by postmaster on request from list owner.

• Digest. Digest subscribers get fewer messages: each one contains the text of several original messages sent to the regular list. Majordomo collects the messages and sends the digest. Other than this, the digest list is a separate list with its own subscriber list and its own list configuration file. Digest must be set up by postmaster on request from list owner.

Privacy Limitations

Majordomo is a medium-security mailing list manager. It is designed to prevent messages being sent by mistake, but does not absolutely block people determined to do the wrong thing.

The commands that provide information about subscribers default to relatively private settings, where only list owner or other subscribers can get the information. This can be configured more or less tightly in the list configuration.

The default subscribe_policy is now open+confirm. Under this setting, anyone can send a subscribe command for any address, but Majordomo does not subscribe the address immediately. Instead Majordomo sends back a message with an authorization code to the apparent subscriber, who must then send in the authorization to confirm the subscription. This has been done to prevent malicious pranks in which someone subscribes a victim to a lot of irrelevant mailing lists. The only recommended alternative policy to this is closed, where list owner has to review subscription by hand.