larlet-fr-david-cache/cache/644b40ac5152c5ca46c214daf4b0b26e/index.md

title: Stay close to your people: here are the mailing lists! url: https://blog.alwaysdata.com/2018/12/11/stay-close-to-your-people-here-are-the-mailing-lists/ hash_url: 644b40ac51

As a French team at always­da­ta, we con­sid­er good things are like good wine: they need time to be nice. Mailing-lists sys­tem is final­ly here, and we’re both hap­py and proud to release it to you!

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Why a mailing-lists feature?

Because we can!

More seri­ous­ly, because it’s a fea­ture many peo­ple ask for a while now. We already host a full e-mail stack for our cus­tomers. You can eas­i­ly cre­ate as much e-mail box­es as you need, redi­rect to oth­er address­es, serv­er-side fil­ter­ing with Sieve, enable anti-virus scan and anti-spam, and many more. There is no rea­son not to offer a full mail­ing-list solu­tion.

The sec­ond rea­son is that it is manda­to­ry for who­ev­er wants to not rely on exter­nal providers or large busi­ness solu­tions for their com­mu­ni­ca­tion, or team orga­ni­za­tion. Nowadays, if you want to use an e-mail based dis­cus­sion sys­tem, the only ready-to-use solu­tion is Google Groups or Mailchimp-like offers. Not that good in term of pri­va­cy or auton­o­my. And we trust in pri­va­cy.

For both rea­sons, it is time to give you the abil­i­ty to self-host and man­age your mail­ing-lists direct­ly from your always­da­ta’s account. Until now, a lit­tle trick was to cre­ate a new e-mail address that redi­rects to many address­es. Even if it works well, it doesn’t offer a clean solu­tion to let peo­ple to sub­scribe to it, nor to mod­er­ate it.

Take My Money!

It won’t be nec­es­sary; this is not an option, it’s a fea­ture!

Just log in to your account, and go to the new Mailing-list sec­tion, it’s enabled by default, as every ser­vice we offer.

Administration Panel: Mailing Lists

We labeled it as Beta for now, because hav­ing this fea­ture enabled means we had to add a new soft­ware in our stack. Even if we test­ed it a lot, new users might encounter unex­pect­ed behav­iors. Report them using our tick­ets sys­tem if you’re fac­ing one.

To cre­ate a new mail­ing list, fill the form view behind the add a mail­ing-list but­ton. You have to indi­cate the mail­ing list name as the form of the local part¹⁾ of an e-mail address; and mail­ing list’s domain. It forms the mail­ing-list pub­lic e-mail address, like infos@alwaysdata.com.

Administration Panel: Create a new Mailing List

Then, like with our databases²⁾, cre­ate one or more users you want to bound to the cre­at­ed mail­ing list. You can spec­i­fy their role³⁾ per list.

Administration Panel: Create a new Mailing User

No more set­up need­ed. All mail­ing-list oper­a­tions are doable in the Postorius inter­face, like bulk adding/removing mem­bers.

Each mail­ing-list come with sev­er­al asso­ci­at­ed address­es, in the form of [listname]-[xtra]@[domain]. Here are few extras avail­able:

• owners: use it to send an email to the mod­er­a­tors and admin­is­tra­tors of the giv­en list
• request: per­form actions on your mail­ing-list account; send help in the sub­ject to get the list of avail­able com­mands
• confirm: man­age the sub­scrip­tions to the list
• bounces: sends con­fir­ma­tion of actions on the list

Our mail­ing-list sys­tem is pow­ered by Mailman. You can rely on its doc­u­men­ta­tion to get some infor­ma­tion about how to use and man­age your lists. Keep in mind that lists’ admin­is­tra­tors and mod­er­a­tors are only set­table in your always­da­ta’s inter­face.

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We promised it for a while. It took time, but we keep our promis­es. Mailing-lists are now a real­i­ty for all always­da­ta users. Because we eat our own dog food, we plan to release a newsletter⁴⁾ in 2019, feel free to sub­scribe!

We have a few more sur­pris­es before the end of the year, so stay tuned!