PMDF User's Guide
UNIX Edition

With pmdf db you may create and maintain your own mailing lists. A mailing list is merely a collection of e-mail addresses with which you associate an alias. Or, looked at a little differently, a mailing list is an alias which expands to a list of e-mail addresses. When you address a mail message to the alias, it actually goes to all of the addressees listed in the mailing list. The act of sending a mail message to a mailing list is referred to as "posting".

A mailing list is created in two steps:

1. Create a text file containing the list of e-mail addresses associated with the mailing list. Each address should be on a separate line in the file. The file itself is referred to as a mailing list file; the addresses in the file are the mailing list's membership.
2. Choose an alias name, alias-name, to associate with the mailing list. Then, in pmdf db, issue the command

   db> add alias-name "<filename"

   filename should include a full file path specification.

For example, suppose the user sue@example.com wants to set up a mailing list named foo-list. The members of the mailing list will be bob@example.com, judy@example.com, ralph@stateu.edu, and sue@example.com herself. Sue first creates the mailing list file /usr/users/sue/sample.dis which contains the four lines

bob@example.com judy@example.com ralph@newcompany.com sue@example.com

Then Sue establishes the alias foo-list for her own use as follows:

% pmdf db db> add foo-list "</usr/users/sue/sample.dis" db> show foo-list attributes Key Value ----------- ----------------------------- sample-list </usr/users/sue/sample.dis Attributes: private,no_expand,block_receipts,mail_address [1 entries shown] db>

At any time you may add or remove members from the mailing list. You do so by simply editing the mailing list file removing or adding addresses from or to it.

Note that only the owner of this list, user sue, may post to the list, and she may only post to it when submitting from a user agent on the PMDF system itself.

As another example, mailing lists defined in LDAP can also be used, for example:

db> add ldap_all_users <"""ldap:///dc=example,dc=edu?mail?sub?(cn=*)"""

Note the three double-quotes around the LDAP URL. This is required.