Majordomo: How I Manage 17 Mailing Lists Without Answering "-request" Mail
D. Brent Chapman · 2001
Majordomo is a perl program written to handle routine administration of Internet mailing lists with as little human intervention as possible. Modeled after the Listserv implementations common on BITNET (but unfortunately rare on the Internet), it automates the administration of mailing lists by allowing users to perform the most frequent operations and unsubscribe) themselves, while allowing the list owners to either each of these operations (or initiate them on behalf of a user), or merely monitor them as they are automatically approved. It also automates response to certain other common queries from users, such as what lists are served by this Majordomo server?, what is the topic of list ’foobar’?, is already on list ’foobar’?, and which lists managed by this Majordomo server am I already on?. Majordomo allows individual list owners to manage their own lists (subscribe and unsubscribe users, and change the general information message for their list) without any action by the overall Majordomo owner. It serves both open lists (where users can add themselves to the list, and the list owner is merely informed of this action) and closed lists (where a subscription request from a user generates an approval request from the Majordomo server to the list owner, who can then either approve or ignore the request). Finally, all interactions with Majordomo by both users and list owners take place totally by electronic mail, so users and list owners do not require login access (nor even direct TCP/IP connectivity) to the machine Majordomo is running on, and no special client software is required.