Listowner's Life

Summary
Transferring Ownership Rights
Deleting a Mailing List
Error Messages
- Suspicious Subscribers

Summary

This page is intended to provide information about the most common questions AEGEE listowners ask, while managing their lists. If something is not mentioned, or unclear, this page will be amended.

Transferring Ownership Rights

To contact the current listowners of listname send a mail to listname-request@aegee.org with a link to this website.

All mailing list shall have at least two listowners to achieve redundancy, when one of them is not available. At the same time when people in some team change they are supposed to tranfer the rights on the lists they have to their successors. Here is how to do it:

You need a listserv password, that is connected to your email address and is used only to manage mailing lists. A new listserv password can be obtained from lists.aegee.org/password. Once you request the password a mail wil be sent to you. Proceed to the next step when you click to the link in that email.
Go to https://lists.aegee.org/yourlist-l.html, e.g. https://lists.aegee.org/aegee-l.html and click on Manage the list. If necessary log in with your e-mail and password, as explained in the previous step.
From the upper menu choose List Management -> List Configuration -> List Configuration Tasks.
In the Administrators tab update the list of the emails that are entitled to manage the list and Submit the changes.
Log out is in the upper right corner.

Deleting a Mailing List A mailing list shall disappear when it is not in use anymore. In such cases the archives are stored and the list can be put again online, including subscribers and archives, at any moment in the future. A mailing list can be deleted, when:

The list is not in use for at least six months. Then the listowners are asked if they approve a deletion. If the e-mail addresses of the listowners are not valid any more, the list is deleted without further notifications.
A listowner asks for deletion.
A subscriber proposes over a list a deletion and there are no objections on the list within one month.
The list is used against the principles of the association.
The list has no subscribers.

Interpreting the Error Messages

Suspicious Subscribers

Symptom: You get error messages from e-mail addresses, that are not subscribed to your list.

A mailing list can be adjusted to remove automatically the invalid addresses, using the Auto-Delete option. When a mail is sent to a list subscriber, which cannot be delivered for whatever reason, an error message is returned to the email address owner-your-list-l@aegee.org . Listserv proceeds all mails coming there and based on them keeps track which mailboxes do not work anymore and for how long time.

Sometimes people do not subcribe with their mailbox, but use an alias for this. When a mail goes to the alias/subscribed e-mail, it is forwarded to the real mailbox, or to another forwarding address. So once the mails go to an alias, the messages continue their way to the final mailbox. If the mailbox does not work, an error is sent back. Unfortunately from the error message it is not possible to find out, which address originally caused the error.

The first option is to look for similar addresses subscribed in the mailing list. Similar might mean e-mail address from the same country, or with the same username, or the subscriber's name contains parts of the local part of the e-mail address. Usually people have similar adderesses among several domains, so if a subscribed address is found, that is similar to the address, generating error messages, check it: Write a test mail to the subscribed address and if the mail comes back from the address, generating address, remove the subscribed e-mail from the list.

If it does not help, the next oportunity is to send you a copy of the mails going to owner-yourlist-l@aegee.org . From them you can see the involved servers in the production of each error. The information is usually sufficient to figure out the original mail domain of the suspicious user.

What can be done as last resort, is called list reneweal, using the keywork Renewal. With this option all subscribers are asked to confirm their membership to the list. Those with unfunctional mailbox do not get the request, cannot confirm it, and as result disappear from the list.

Written in March 2007 by Дилян Палаузов