PMDF User's Guide
OpenVMS Edition

With PMDF DB you can 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 three 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. Set the protection of the mailing list file so that it is world readable

   $ SET PROTECTION=(W:R) filename

   Here, filename is the name of the mailing list file created in Step 1.

3. Choose an alias name, alias-name , to associate with the mailing list. Then, in PMDF DB, issue the commands

   db> add alias-name "<filename" db> set alias-name public

   filename should include a full path specification including the disk and directory name.

For example, suppose the user sue@example.com wants to set up a mailing list named sample-list. The members of the mailing list will be bob@example.com, judy@example.com, ralph@sample.com, and sue@example.com. Sue first creates the mailing list file D1:[SUE]SAMPLE.DIS which contains the four lines

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

She then makes sure the distribution file is world readable by explicitly setting its protection with the DCL SET PROTECTION command,

$ SET PROTECTION=(W:R) D1:[SUE]SAMPLE.DIS

Finally, Sue establishes the public alias FOO-LIST as follows:

$ PMDF DB db> add foo-list "<d1:[sue]sample.dis" db> set foo-list public db> show foo-list attributes Key Value ----------- ----------------------------- foo-list <d1:[sue]sample.dis Attributes: public,no-expand,block-receipts,mail-address [1 entries shown] db>

By declaring the list to be public, Sue is allowing other people to post messages to this mailing list. They should do so by addressing their messages to sue+sample-list@example.com. Messages so addressed will then be received by the members of the list as specified by the contents of the file D1:[SUE]SAMPLE.DIS.

At any time you can 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.

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.