Email Commands

Members and administrators may use email commands to subscribe and unsubscribe, change member settings, and retrieve list and member information.

Early email list management software programs did not have a web interface to facilitate list and member management; all administration was performed by sending email commands to the server.

The Aurea List Manager web interface allows members and administrators to interact with Aurea List Manager without email commands, but email commands are still useful in situations where the web interface is not available. The email commands may also be used by scripts to add, edit or delete members.

How Email Commands Work

Email commands may be sent in one of two formats:

• Commands may be sent to the listmanager@server command address: listmanager@theserverhostname. The commands the sender wishes to perform are part of the body of the message, e.g., join listname. Many commands may be included in one message. This method is generally used by list administrators adding, editing or unsubscribing members, but may also be used by members who wish to edit their settings.
• Commands may be sent in the email address itself, so a sender may send a message to join-listname@theserverhostname and be added to the specified list name without a message body.

When Aurea List Manager receives a command via email, it looks at the email address the message was sent From: and performs the request if its list and server rules permit. It then sends a response to the requestor unless the quiet command is used to suppress the response.

Legacy Commands

Aurea List Manager also accepts mail for most of the common list manager addresses. With Aurea List Manager, you have the option of several different kinds of command syntax. Wherever possible, it was made to be compatible with the command syntax of other list processor programs, so that users can use the command they are familiar with, and are not required to learn something new.

Invalid Commands

When Aurea List Manager sees an invalid command, it takes note, and moves to the next line. If more than ten lines in an email message are invalid, the message processing stops.

For example, consider an administrator who sends a series of commands to Aurea List Manager, but the administrator misspells one of the commands. In such a case, the correctly spelled commands are executed, and an email message is sent to the person indicating which commands were successfully processed and which lines in the email message did not appear to be Aurea List Manager commands.

If you are having problems sending email commands to Aurea List Manager, try sending the message in plain text. HTML formatting may add extra lines to the beginning of the message, and may change the commands so they are illegible to Aurea List Manager.

Signature Detection

Since so many people on the Internet use signatures, Aurea List Manager has a built-in signature detection mechanism. The purpose of this mechanism is to stop processing the message, which prevents signature lines from generating errors in the response email Aurea List Manager sends out. Detecting a signature is analogous to issuing the "end" command.

This mechanism looks for either of these character strings: "--", "**", or "==". Once one of these strings is encountered, Aurea List Manager stops processing the message immediately. Please note that this mechanism is not fully activated in a MIME-encoded message, because in that case the "--" may be a content type separator, and in that case the message still needs to be processed. The exception is if the MIME type is "text/plain", in which case the parser still check for "---", since it isn't oddly encoded.