Ministry Systems’ New List Server at thomas.sheperd.com.

  List Menu

It really does work.

1. Paper & postage are expensive, none required.
2. Owner administration is interactive through your browser.
3. Fast Set Up
4. List visibility to addressees, an owner’s option.
5. Live Body Support
6. Save 50% of your postage costs.* i.e. per item Communication costs reduced from $1.00 – 0.25 to $0.005.

Examples of Asynchronous Meetings (all list users have posting rights)

1. Organization Staff
2. One Time Project Team
3. Family Groups
4. International Discussion Group
5. Board of Directors

Examples of High Speed News Letters (only list owner has posting rights)

1. Emergency Prayer Letters
2. Regular Prayer Letters
3. Status/Activity Reports
4. One-time list (Email Merge)
5. Teacher to parent, school assignments, meetings etc.
6. Notice of choir practice.
7. From a Christianity Today Feature article by Jody Veenker based on a Pew Family Trust Project
   ”Creating a sense of community or belonging is also the motivation behind many churches' plans to develop weekly topical e-mail lists for things like prayer requests and missions updates. Some are even considering a full congregational e-mail roster to announce births, marriages, deaths and other news of interest.”
8. Newsletters, See references 2 & 3 below.

System Numbers

1.      Capacity – 250K messages/day

2.      Current Use – 150K messages/mo.

3.      Response Time – With distributed input, User Reports 15 Min.

4.      Suggested Monthly Donation - $5 min per ministry partner with a reasonable number of lists or $0.003 per message, which ever is greater?

What Users Need to Know – Help Extracts

1.      List Administration

2.      List Parameters

3.      List Digest

Ref. 1. “Christianity Today” at www.christianitytoday.org/ct/2001/003/10.17.html

        2. ASSIST News Service 

        3. GospelCom’s regular list at www.gospelcom.net/ifc.html

Help: List Administration

If you have List Administrator permissions, you can create, modify, and delete list-server mailing lists for your mail host.

To create a list:

1. In your Web browser, open the Web Messaging page for your mail host and log on to your mail account.
2. On the Menu page, select List Administration. The List Administration page appears.
3. If necessary, select a mail host and click the Update Lists button to see the current mailing lists for the host.
4. In the Name box enter a name for the list server mailing list; this name is the e-mail address that people who want to post to the list will send mail to. For example, if you enter the name "Birdinfo," users will send mail to the list by specifying the To address: Birdinfo@companyX.com. The name must be from 3 to 23 characters in length, with no spaces between characters.

   In the Description box, enter a description of the list.

   In the Administrator box, enter the user ID of the person who will be the list administrator.

5. Click Create. The List Parameters page appears.

To modify a list, click the Set button next to the list or click the list name. The List Parameters page appears.

To delete a list, click the Delete button next to the list

Help: List Parameters

This page lets you set and modify the parameters for the selected list-server mailing list. You can:

1. Click the Help button to view or edit the help text that is sent to anyone who requests help or sends an invalid command to this list.
2. Click the Subscribe button to view or edit the confirmation text that will be sent to each person who submits a successful subscribe request to this list.
3. Click the Header button to view or edit the text message that appears at the beginning of every message sent to the list.
4. Click the Trailer button to view or edit the text message that appears at the end of every message sent to the list.
5. Click the Users button to view or edit the list of addresses that this list sends mail to. You can add, modify, or delete your list user's e-mail addresses. Note that this list of addresses is automatically updated by the list server: when a user subscribes to the list, their e-mail address is added; when a user unsubscribes, their e-mail address is delete.
6. Select options that determine how the list operates, and then click Set List Options.

   Reply to List. Make replies (from subscribers) go to the list, rather than the sender.

   Enable Digest Mode. Groups the messages sent to this list into a digest, then sends the digest periodically. See Digest Options for more information.

   Enable Subject modification. to prepend a text string to the subject line of every message sent to the list. For example, if you enter [Discussion List] as the prepended text, a message with the subject, Parrot, will appear on the list server with the subject line: Subject: re:[Discussion List] Parrot. The default text is the name of this list.

   Enable Header. Displays a text message at the beginning of every message sent to the list. Click the Header button to view or modify the message.

   Enable Trailer. Displays a text message at the beginning of every message sent to the list. Click the Trailer button to view or modify the message.

   Maximum message size. Enter the Maximum message size in bytes of a message that can be sent to this list. Enter 0 if you want the size to be unlimited.

   Number of Recipients per Message. You must calculate this number; it determines the number of recipients each SMTP process will send to. If you expect under 2000 users subscribing to the list, enter 25. If you expect over 2000 users subscribing to the list, divide the expected number of subscribers by 25, and enter the result as the Number of recipients per message.

7. Select the security options you want to use, and then click Set List Options.

   Anyone can post. Lets anyone on the Internet post mail to the list. This is the default selection.

   Only Subscribers can post. Lets only the subscribers post mail.

   Only Moderator can post. Lets only the list owner post mail. Moderator is used when you want the list owner to review all messages before they are posted to the list.

   Disable List Command. A user can obtain a list of the users subscribed to a list by addressing a message to the list server (for example, imailsrv@domain.com) and issuing the list listname command in the body of the message. Select this option if you do not want users to receive a list of the subscribers to your list-server mailing list. If the list is set to Only Subscribers can post or Only Moderated can post, subscribers can still send the Help or List command to obtain a list of subscribers.

   Disable Subscriptions (Private List). When selected, a Subscribe request will be rejected. The List Administrator must add new users manually (see Step 5).

   Allow Unsubscribe based on subject line. When a user wants to unsubscribe from the list-server mailing list, most list servers expect the Unsubscribe command to be specified in the body of mail message. If you want the list-server mailing list to also accept an Unsubscribe command specified in the Subject line of the message, select this option. When selected, the list-server mailing list will accept the following commands in the Subject line to unsubscribe: unsubscribe, remove, signoff.

8. You can use the kill file to specify a mail address or a particular mail host that you do not want to accept mail from. Click Kill to view or edit the kill file. To add a mail address or host in the kill file, enter it in the edit box, and then click the Add button. You can use the following formats:

   userid@host

   @host

   For example, to deny access from a user mail account, you could enter: fred@widget.com To deny access to all users from the mail host widget.com, you can enter: @widget.com IMail Server checks the incoming message's From <user@host> line. When it receives mail from an address listed in the kill file, IMail Server returns the message:

   501 unacceptable mail address

   To modify an address, select it in the list, make changes in the edit box, and click Modify.

   To delete an address, select it in the list or enter it in the edit box, and click Delete.

   Notes: The kill file (kill.lst) is used by:

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Last Changed on: Sunday July 06, 2008