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Launchpad Mailing Lists

Launchpad allows a team to set up a discussion mailing list which is open to all members of the team. For the technically minded, Launchpad mailing lists are managed by GNU Mailman although we have simplified the web interface, allowing you to more easily administer your mailing lists. Using Launchpad alleviates the need for external mail hosting and simplifies life for users and administrators who can use a single Launchpad account to manage their participation in multiple mailing lists.

Benefits

Using Launchpad to host your mailing lists has several advantages over self-hosted lists.

Using Launchpad hosted lists

Launchpad mailing lists are team-oriented; every team may have one mailing list, and every mailing list is associated with exactly one team. Any member of the team may subscribe to the team's mailing list but team members are not required to participate on the mailing list.

When you join a list, you designate one of your Launchpad-validated email addresses on which to receive mail from that list. You may post to any mailing list from any of your validated email addresses, but you will only receive messages from each list on the designated address for that list. You may also ask Launchpad to use your preferred email address and have mail from that list sent to your current preferred email address, whatever that happens to be at the time.

Note:

Subscribed team members may post their messages to myteam@lists.launchpad.net and the archives for the team mailing list is always available at http://lists.launchpad.net/myteam.

Establishing a mailing list

If you are a team administrator, look on your team overview page. You will see an action called Configure mailing list:

Note that you can also set your Launchpad mailing list to be your team's contact address.

Subscribing to a mailing list

Before you can send or receive messages on your mailing list, you should subscribe to it. This includes the team owner who requested the mailing list. Once your list is live (see above), these are the steps you need to take to subscribe to the mailing list.

If you want to join the team at the same time you subscribe to its mailing list, just go to the team's overview page and click on the Join this team button. This will take you to the join page where you will be presented with a checkbox for joining the team's mailing list at the same time. Enable this, click Join and you will be both joined to the team and subscribed to its mailing list.

(Note that the checkbox will either be enabled or disabled by default depending on your auto-subscription setting. Go to your personal Change e-mail settings page and click Never subscribe to mailing lists to default this checkbox off (i.e. opt-in). Set this to Ask me when I join a team to default this checkbox on (i.e. opt-out). If you set this to Always subscribe me to mailing lists you will automatically be subscribed to any team's mailing list when you join the team. With this last setting, you will also be automatically subscribed to a team's mailing list whenever anybody else joins you to a team also.)

If you're already a member of the team, you can still join its mailing list from the team's overview page, or you can manage all your team mailing list subscriptions in one place:

Using your mailing list

Using your mailing list is the easiest part of this process! If your team is named myteam, then once the list is live and you have subscribed to it, just send a message to myteam@lists.launchpad.net in your mail reader of choice. After a few minutes, depending on network latencies, you should receive your message in your inbox, and the message will appear in the archive.

Note: if you use Gmail and you do not see your own posts arrive in your inbox, it is probably because of this issue. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it, but if you check your list's archive, your message should appear there.

Unsubscribing

Unsubscribing is easy. Just visit your Launchpad mailing list subscriptions page, scroll down to the list of teams you're subscribed to, and chose Don't Subscribe for any list you want to get off of. Click Update Subscriptions.

Posting to lists without subscribing

If you want to make a one-off post to a list, you don't have to subscribe. Instead, you can post to it using any email address registered in your Launchpad profile.

Your post will be held for moderation and it is up to the relevant team's administrators to decide whether or not to accept your post.

List administration

Moderating posts from non-subscribers

From time to time, you may find that people post to your mailing list without first subscribing.

So long as the posts are from registered Launchpad users, Launchpad holds the posts for you - as a team administrator - to moderate. When there are new posts to moderate, you can see them by following the link in the Actions menu on your team's overview page.

ListHelp/Draft (last edited 2008-11-08 17:15:29 by host33-58-dynamic)