Central Oregon Internet is offering mailing lists for our customers using the powerful combination of qmail (our preferred mail transport agent) and the ezmlm mailing list manager. Ezmlm and qmail can blast out thousands of messages in a short period of time, and along with its ease of use makes it among the most popular list managers out there.

Some of ezmlm's features:

• Fast and easy-to-use.

• Uses VERPs to handle bounces and automatically remove invalid addresses after 10 days (after sending a warning and then a probe to the bouncing address).

• Message archiving and retrieval.
• Moderated lists.

• Remote administration -- add and remove subscribers, modify list FAQ and help instructions remotely, and more.

• Reliable even in the face of system crashes. ezmlm writes each new subscription and each message to disk before it reports success to the mail server.

List addresses will be of the form yourlist@lists.coinet.com where yourlist is the name you selected for your mailing list. If you have your own domain name, you can have yourlist@yourdomain.com for an additional $5/month.

Information on how to manage a mailing list can be found by reading the Ezmlm Manual online. The section you should concentrate on would be the user's and remote administrator sections and the ezmlm commands section. However, the owner section has good information as well, although some of the unix commands shown can only be done by Coinet technicians.

Creating your HTML page

You don't need a website to get a mailing list, but if you have one you may find it very handy for people to be able to subscribe on your web site.

The CGI script we've setup on our web server expects the form on your web page to submit the following variables:

listtarget   name of mailing list to subscribe/
             unsubscribe. Do not include the 
             domain name in this variable.

list_request Request that should be processed.  
             This is either "subscribe" or 
             "unsubscribe".  The example uses 
             radio buttons on a form to capture 
             the user's selection.

user_email   User's email address

noticetarget Optional email address where user's 
             comments can be sent.

comments     Optional comments -- used only if 
             noticetarget is set

acktitle     HTML title to be displayed on 
             acknowledgement of request.

acktext      Text of message to be displayed on 
             acknowledgement of request.

Example HTML

This is an example of how you might write a webpage for people to subscribe at your web site! To see the actual HTML code, go here. This form actually works, so you can try it out and see what you get in your mailbox after submitting.

Use this form to subscribe or unsubscribe yourself to our mailing list.