No longer relevant at 2016-09 now berklix has moved form majordomo to mailman. ------- To suggest different wording, perhaps more understandable to non technical people, do Not send it to { Julian, List Owner, Berklix, Server Owner, FreeBSD maintainers, or anywhere other than } to correct maintainer address at http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/ Majordomo is just one of tens of thousands of free software packages available on all of { the FreeBSD Ports Collection http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/freebsd/packages/ , NetBSD & Linux & other Unixes etc }; ( eg majordomo@netbsd.org is another instance of majordomo, similar mechanism, but serving different lists than majordomo@berklix.org ). Majordomo is not some special programme just for Berklix etc, but was extremely widely used standard free software (less used now, since ISPs started forcing clueless users to use HTML mail, which majordomo does Not handle quietly (so berklix.org automatically foreces HTML to Ascii using a demime filter)). For extra notes see also: http://www.berklix.org/help/majordomo/ Some of the majordomo functions ( such as which index etc ) have been turned off at berklix.org, (so will not work, or will return no useful info), since the Internet became a dangerous environment, including spammers, & random attack robots, etc, & after a minority of malicious list abusers too. Below is from majordomo-1.94.5 on FreeBSD-9.2 ------------ MAJORDOMO(8) MAJORDOMO(8) NAME Majordomo - manage multiple mailing lists SYNOPSIS Majordomo DESCRIPTION Majordomo is a perl script which automates the management of Internet mailing lists. It is executed via electronic mail; users send e-mail to Majordomo with instructions in the body of the message, and the perl script performs the requested actions and responds with the results. Any text in the "Subject:" line is ignored. COMMANDS Majordomo understands the following commands (arguments in "[]" are optional): subscribe list [address] Subscribe yourself (or address if specified) to the named list. unsubscribe list [address] Unsubscribe yourself (or address if specified) from the named list. If list is ``*'' (an asterisk), unsubscribe from all lists on this Major- domo server. auth special-word subscribe list address If the list subscribe policy setting includes +confirm, Majordomo will ask for confirmation before a subscription is approved. The conforma- tion request will show the special-word to send with auth . get list file Get the file related to list. index list Return an index of the files you can get associated with list. which [address] Find out to which lists you (or address if specified) are subscribed. who list Find out who is on the named list. info list Retrieve the general introductory information for the named list. intro list Retrieve the introductory message sent to new users of list. Non-sub- scribers may not be able to retrieve this. lists Show the lists served by this Majordomo server. It will also show a 50 character list description if one has been provided. help Retrieve an informational message, a brief synopsis of the user portion of this manual page. end Stop processing commands (useful if your mailer adds a signature). A command may be split across multiple lines if all of the lines in the command except the last end with a backslash "\". In addition, the owner of the list can issue the following commands: approve password subscribe list address Instruct Majordomo to add address to list. The password is required to authenticate the list owner. This is very weak authentication as the password is transmitted in the clear in an e-mail message. No claims are made that it will provide anything other than rudimentary protec- tion against abuse of the Majordomo server. approve password unsubscribe list address Instruct Majordomo to delete address from list. The password is required to authenticate the list owner. See the comments above regarding the password. newinfo list password Update the informational message for list with the text which follows on subsequent lines. No formatting of the message occurs, so the list owner should be careful to constrain the message to eighty columns. Majordomo will include everything up to the string EOF or to the end of the mail message, whichever comes first. This is useful in case the owner wants to verify the new message immediately, e.g., To: majordomo newinfo list password This is new information for the "list" list. EOF info list This will simultaneously update the information for the list, and then retrieve it for verification. Note that blank lines are pre- served in the message. newintro list password Similar to newinfo , but updates the (optional) introductory message sent to new list subscribers. passwd list old-password new-password Replace the password for list with new-password. config list password retrieve a self-documenting configuration file for the list . The password can be the password contained in the file .passwd or the admin_password in the configuration file. newconfig list password Validates and installs a new configuration file. The config file includes everything up to the string EOF or to the end of the mail mes- sage, whichever comes first. The config file is expected to be a com- plete config file as returned by the "config" command. Incremental changing of the config file is not yet supported. As soon as the con- fig file is validated and installed its settings are available for use. This is useful to remember if you have multiple commands in your mail message since they will be subject to the settings of the new config file. If there is an error in the config file (incorrect value...), the config file will not be accepted and the error message identifying the problem line(s) will be returned to the sender. Note that only the errors are returned to the sender not the entire config file. writeconfig list password Write a new config in standard form. All of the config file documenta- tion is optional. Only the keywords and values are necessary. If a con- fig file, stripped of all comments is installed using newconfig, that is what is returned by config. Writeconfig forces a rewrite of the config file with all comments and default values in place. It is useful to use after an upgrade of majordomo since it will add the new keywords for people to change. It also updates the documentation in the file if that has changed. mkdigest digest-list-name [ outgoing-address ] password This will force a digest for the specified list to be created. It is most useful if you don't have an account on the machine that handles the digest for your list. The optional outgoing-address will override the default address, listname-outgoing, for distributing the digests; this is usually done for security. CONFIGURATION (Note that this section has not been updated to majordomo version 1.90). Majordomo supports open and closed lists. An open list is one to which anyone can subscribe themselves. A subscription request sent to Majordomo for a closed list is forwarded to the owner of the list for approval. If a user tries to subscribe an address which is differ- ent from their own (for example, a local list exploder), Majordomo will forward the request to the list owner for approval, regardless of the open or closed status of the list. Majordomo depends on the existence of certain system mail aliases. The first three are for running the perl script on incoming e-mail and specifying the responsible person in charge of the server: majordomo: "|/usr/local/mail/majordomo/wrapper majordomo" majordomo-owner: brent owner-majordomo: brent These next few aliases are for a list called "sample": sample: :include:/usr/local/mail/lists/sample owner-sample: sample-owner sample-request: "|/usr/local/mail/majordomo/wrapper request-answer sam- ple" owner-sample-request: sample-owner sample-owner: brent sample-approval: brent FILES /usr/local/etc/majordomo.cf /usr/local/lib/mail/majordomo/ BUGS This man page has not been fully updated to conform to majordomo 1.90. AUTHORS Majordomo and most of the ancillary perl code was written by Brent Chapman, . The latest version of the code is available by anonymous FTP from FTP.GreatCircle.COM, in directory pub/majordomo. This man page was written by Jim Duncan, . Minimal update of the man page by John Rouillard . MAJORDOMO(8)