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Mlalias

Mlalias



Summary

mlalias is a locally written program for redirecting email. It can be used to forward your CSE email to another email account e.g. Unimail or Yahoo; to receive email for conferences or research projects; and to operate mailing lists. As mlalias is a component of CSE's Localmail it has hooks into other locally written software, most notably the UDB, which make it very well suited for mailing groups of CSE users. It does not work so well for non-CSE users, especially if you want a non-CSE person to be able to send to or control the list. Look at MailMan for this purpose instead.



Forwarding email vs. mailing lists

mlalias is simply a program that takes email sent to a CSE email address and forwards it to all the recipients defined in the mlalias (which means, among other things, it replaces Sendmail's .forward mechanism). An mlalias name must take one of 3 forms: Only SystemSupport can create a system mlalias or an mlalias for a NoLogin account; common examples include cse-announce, stu-general and compsoc but they can also be created for more specific purposes such as receiving email for a conference or project.

Setting up a mailing list

If you can login, you can create an mlalias under your username. See RedirectingMail or man mlalias for basic mlalias commands.

If you want an mlalias that doesn't have your username attached, email System Support with details as to the reason for the request, the desired name for the mlalias and the list of owners of the mlalias, all of whom must have current CSE accounts.

Managing a mailing list

Adding and removing recipients and owners

Recipients are added and removed with the -a and -d flags respectively; you can simply list the names after the flag. Owners are added and removed with the -A and -D flags respectively and the flag has to be repeated with each owner.

Allowing and blocking mail to the list (moderation and authorised posters)

By default an mlalias can be mailed to by anybody, whether they are a CSE user or not. To block unwanted emails you have to:
  1. make the list moderated
  2. (optional) allow some accounts to send to the list.
There can only be one moderator for an mlalias and they must already be an owner. Read more about moderation.

Deleting a mlalias or mailing list

Do not simply remove all recipients as this will not destroy the mlalias; email sent to an empty mlalias is stored on the mailserver with no way to download it until a recipient is re-added to the mlalias. If you are an owner of the mlalias or list you can destroy it with mlalias -R <list>. If there are other owners of the list it is courteous to obtain their assent first.

Mailing students enrolled in X/all members of research group X

Users with the same type of account can be emailed simply by virtue of their common membership of a UDB class with no need to add their names explicitly to the list. This is known as a virtual mlalias.

What lists already exist at CSE?

A number of mlaliases already exist for various purposes.

Tags for this page:

alias email forwarding lists mlalias redirecting