10.2 Creating Mailing Lists

Using the web interface on savannah.gnu.org is by far the easiest way to create normal mailing lists, managed through Mailman on the GNU mail server. Once you register your package on Savannah, you can create (and remove) lists yourself through the ‘Mailing Lists’ menu, without needing to wait for intervention by anyone else. Furthermore, lists created through Savannah will have a reasonable default configuration for antispam purposes (see below).

To create and maintain simple aliases and unmanaged lists, you can edit /com/mailer/aliases on the main GNU server. If you don’t have an account there, please read https://www.gnu.org/software/README.accounts.html (see GNU Accounts and Resources).

But if you don’t want to learn how to do those things, you can ask new-mailing-list@gnu.org to help you.

You should moderate postings from non-subscribed addresses on your mailing lists, to prevent propagation of unwanted messages (“spam”) to subscribers and to the list archives. For lists controlled by Mailman, you can do this by setting Privacy Options - Sender Filter - generic_nonmember_action to Hold, and then periodically (daily is best) reviewing the held messages, accepting the real ones and discarding the junk.

Lists created through Savannah will have this setting, and a number of others, such that spam will be automatically deleted (after a short delay). The Savannah mailing list page describes all the details. You should still review the held messages in order to approve any that are real.