cPanel Tutorials – Mailing Lists

Hi there! A technical writer with the documentation team at cPanel, the hosting platform of choice. I’m going to show you how to use cPanel’s Mailing Lists interface. This interface allows you to use a single email address to send mail to multiple email addresses. It’s great for keeping users informed so they aren’t surprised by any major changes or updates that may occur.

cPanel comes packaged with the Mailman software, which allows you to easily manage your Mailing Lists. A quick note about some good practices: you should always ask users for permission before adding them to a mailing list. Although you might like cats wearing hats, you shouldn’t assume that everyone is interested in being on this sort of mailing list. Also, you should always provide users with the option to opt in and out of your mailing lists.

OK, let’s login to our cPanel account.

On the cPanel interface we have the Mailing Lists feature icon under the Email section here. However, let’s search for the feature in the provided text box here, then click the icon. The Mailing Lists interface will appear. At the top of this interface is the Create a Mailing List section. This is where the mailing list magic begins.

At the bottom of this interface is the Current Lists section. This displays our Mailing Lists, if we have any.

But since we currently don’t have any mailing lists, this section is empty. Let’s fix that.

Let’s revisit the Create a Mailing List section and enter a name for our new list.

Since we’re passionate about cats in hats, let’s enter “catsinhats” in the list name text box.

Enter a password and then enter it again to confirm that the password is accurate. We need to ensure that our password meets the required strength set by the hosting provider.

For this tutorial, let’s use the convenient Password Generator button here. The Password Generator window will appear.

We can use this to generate a password that meets the strength requirements. We can also use Advanced Options to refine our generated password. Let’s copy the generated password, check the box to confirm, then click Use Password. The interface now displays that our password meets the required strength. Next, we have the Access Type section.

This lets us set our list as private or publicly available. The Public option sets our archives for the mailing list public, allows open subscription to the list, and Mailman will advertise our list on the server.

If we select the Private option, our archives are private and only visible to our list members, and the list’s administrators must approve new subscriptions to the list. Also, our mailing list won’t be publicly advertised by Mailman on the server. Don’t worry though.

We can always change these settings. More on that later. For now, let’s select the Public option and make this list available for everyone to view. Click Add to create our mailing list. The interface displays a confirmation message that it successfully created our mailing list and confirms that it’s set to public.

If we check our email, we can see that the system sent a message about our new list. This provides details about the list, where to configure it, and a URL link to the list. It also provides an email-based interface for our members and information about how to unsubscribe users. For now, let’s click Go Back to return to the Mailing Lists interface. The Current Lists section now displays our new mailing list.

Excellent! In this section we can view details about our mailing lists. This includes information such as the current disk space our archive uses, whether the list is Private or Public, the assigned administrators, and various administrative functions.

Such functions include the Delete and Change Password options. These are pretty straightforward: we can remove a mailing list with Delete or change the mailing list password.

However, we also have the Manage and Delegation functions. Why don’t we check out that Manage function. The system opens a new browser window that directs us to the administrative interface for our mailing list. Since we accessed this through the cPanel interface, the system automatically logs us into this interface. Pretty convenient, right?

The List Management interface provides a lot of configuration options. I recommend that you check out Mailman’s List Administrator documentation for more information. I’ve included a link to this in the video description below.

For now, let’s return to the Mailing List interface and check out the Delegation option.

First, an important note about delegation: this is not the same thing as moderation.

Moderation privileges allow users to manage pending messages or subscription requests.

The Moderation privilege has limited permissions, and users cannot change list configurations.

You can assign Moderators in the Mailman administrative interface with the Manage function. However, Delegated users possess access to the mailing list’s administrative functionality. This privilege allows users to configure all of the mailing lists parameters and allows you to manage administrative maintenance with other users.

Be advised that this privilege poses a security risk. Delegating a user may enable them with a means by which to take over your cPanel account, so you should always make certain that you give this privilege to someone you can trust. Let’s click delegation and the row for our new mailing list. The system directs us to the Administrator Privileges Delegation interface. From the Available Users list, let’s select which user that we want to give administrative privileges to.

Click the right arrow here to add them. To remove a user, select that user from the List Administrators list, then click the left arrow. Click Save. A confirmation message will appear. Let’s click Go Back to return to the Mailing Lists interface.

In the Current Lists section, we can see that we now have two administrators: ourselves and the user that we approved in the previous interface. Let’s revisit our privacy permissions for this list. In the Access column we can manage our privacy options for our new list. Let’s click Public. A window with the list’s privacy options will appear.

With this we can retool our privacy settings, such as whether we want this list advertised by Mailman on the server. We can select to keep our archives private and how we want to handle the approval of new subscribers. If we want to quickly set this list as private, we can click use private settings here.

The system will automatically configure the options required to set this list to private. If we decide that we don’t want to make any changes, we can just click Reset Form here to revert our changes or click Cancel.

Why don’t we keep our settings? Click Cancel to return to the Mailing List interface. Now we’re ready to share our love of cats and hats with the world! …or at least with our list’s subscribers. Thank you for viewing this tutorial! I’ve included a link to our Mailing List documentation in the video description below. Check it out for more information on this feature.

Also, be sure to subscribe to our channel to keep up to date with our tutorial releases. If you want more information about cPanel, come visit us over at cPanel dot com, or follow at cPanel on Twitter.

See you next time!

https://www.interserver.net/vps?id=976638&sid=Mailing-List

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