Managing and using mailing lists

Objective

Mailing lists are used to contact subscribers en masse, i.e. to send an email or information to several recipients at once. This may be of interest to you if you want to share information on a new product release (for an e-commerce website), for example — or to let people know about a future event (for a community website).

Find out how to manage your mailing lists.

Moderation

A mailing list can be moderated, to control who is able to send emails to your list of subscribers. A moderated mailing list is useful for sending newsletters, for example — while a non-moderated mailing list can make it easier for several subscribers to contact one other via email.

Non-moderated mailing list

The sender sends an email to the mailing list, and the subscribers receive the email directly.

Moderated mailing list

The sender sends an email to the mailing list. The moderator receives an email with a request to validate or refuse the email. If the moderator chooses to validate the email, the subscribers will receive the email sent to the mailing list. If the moderator chooses to refuse the email, it is erased, and the subscribers will not receive anything.

Requirements

• an MX Plan 100 minimum or web hosting plan eligible for mailing lists

OVHcloud Control Panel Access

• Direct link: MX Plan
• Navigation path: Web Cloud > MX Plan > Select your MX Plan service

Instructions

Create a mailing list

To create a mailing list, go to the Mailing lists tab for your email service.

If you have already created mailing lists, they will be listed in the summary table. In the example below, a mailing list has already been created.

To create a new mailing list, click Add a mailing list.

Fill in the form with the information listed in the table below:

Manage mailing list options

To modify the mailing list options, click the ... to the right-hand side of it. You can then update the options, delete the mailing list, or share the list of subscribers via email.

Manage subscribers

To manage subscribers to your mailing list, click on the silhouette next to the “Subscribers” column.

The following window will pop up:

Add/Remove subscribers

Add subscribers	Remove subscribers
Click Add subscribers on the right-hand side.	Click Remove via a file on the right-hand side.

There are two ways of adding and removing subscribers:

• entering the email address manually by clicking Add an email address
• importing a text file containing one email address per line, by clicking on the upload icon next to the manual entry button

Export your list of subscribers to a CSV file

Click Export subscribers in CSV format to generate a CSV file containing all of your subscribers. This option is not available in our example, because no subscribers have been added.

Manage moderators

To manage moderators on your mailing list, click on the silhouette in the “Moderators” column.

The following window will pop up:

Add/Remove moderators

Add moderators	Remove moderators
Click Add moderators on the right-hand side.	Click Remove via a file on the right-hand side.

There are two ways of adding and removing moderators:

• entering the email address manually by clicking Add an email address
• importing a text file containing one email address per line, by clicking on the upload icon next to the manual entry button

Depending on the number of subscribers you need to add, this may take some time to do.

Subscribe to a mailing list

If someone wants to subscribe to your mailing list, they can simply send an email to:

your_mailing_list_name-subscribe@yourdomain.com

Unsubscribe from a mailing list

If someone wants to unsubscribe from your mailing list, they can simply send an email to:

your_mailing_list_name-unsubscribe@yourdomain.com

Automatic removal of incorrect email addresses

The mailing list system will not remove a subscriber from the list after just one error message (email not delivered, email address does not exist, etc.). It will wait around 12 days after the first failed sending attempt, then send a warning email to the subscriber.

The warning email will contain the references of the emails they have failed to receive. If this warning email also fails to send, our mailing list system will wait another 12 days and send a “test” email. If this test email also fails to send, the subscriber is then removed from the subscription list.

Recurring errors

Sending an email without including a subject

Emails sent to a mailing list must contain a subject. Without a subject, an error will automatically be generated, and the email will bounce back to the sender with an error message.

The user sending an email without a subject will receive an error email like the one listed below:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mx1.ovh.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<newsletter@yourdomain.com>:

ezmlm-reject: fatal: Sorry, I don't accept message with empty Subject (#5.7.0)

Send emails entering an email address into the Carbon Copy (Cc) field

To send an email to a mailing list, the address needs to be entered in either the “To” field, or the “Cc” field.

If the user enters the email address into the “Bcc” field, the email will bounce back with an error message.

The sender will receive an error message similar to the one below:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mx1.ovh.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<newsletter@yourdomain.com>:

ezmlm-reject: fatal: List address must be in To: or Cc: (#5.7.0)

Advanced customisation

You can customise most of the texts in your mailing list. As a moderator, you will need to send an empty email to name_of_your_ML-edit@mydomain.ovh.

• Example: Your mailing list is newsletter@mydomain.ovh. From your moderator email address, you will need to send an email to newsletter-edit@mydomain.ovh.

You will then receive an email that will guide you on the changes you need to make.

Below is a list of files containing the reply texts, and a brief description of how to use their content. To edit a file, simply send an email to send-edit.file, replacing ‘file’ with the file name. The editing instructions will be sent with the text file.

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