Software Used to Maintain the CAST10 Email List and Message Archive
The software used to automate maintenance of the email list and to
archive submitted messages consists of the Majordomo email list
manager, the Hypermail message archiver, a mail filter
script, and an email reader/composer.
All software runs on the unix workstation network of the
UMd School of Engineering. This software is used to maintain
both the cast10 and ncs (the AIChE
National Capital Section)
email subscription lists.
Majordomo
The email subscription list is managed by
Majordomo. All
list maintenance is performed by email; in the case of the
cast10 list, any user can subscribe/unsubscribe themselves
by sending mail to emailman@ench.umd.edu
subscribe cast10
end optional -- tells Majordomo to stop reading at this point
Note that each mailing list has an associated password (passwd in this
description) known to the list moderator(s) (moderatoruserID in
the description below).
The list moderator can subscribe/unsubscribe members
and perform other list maintenance by mailing the request
to emailman using the following format
approve passwd subscribe cast10 usrname add usrname to cast10
help produces a list of commands available for Majordomo
end
Any user (including those not on the subscription list) can
submit messages to to cast10@ench.umd.edu to be posted;
all messages are automatically bounced to the account(s) of the moderator(s).
If the moderator approves the message, he or she inserts/edits the following
(this is most easily done using pine, emacs, or other mail utility)
forward the message to cast10@ench.umd.edu
line1 of the new message should consist of
approved: passwd
cut the message heading text to sent Date:
skip to the beginning of the message text (be sure to leave Content-type and message ID lines)
(no blank line above this and other email header info)
immediately after Keywords: line, insert the file (C-r in pine): cast10/note.txt,
which contains the message
-----------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Past postings on the CAST10 Email List are archived on the
World Wide Web at http://www.ench.umd.edu/cast10
-----------------------------------------------------------------
edit Subject line to include CAST: Original subject
send the message.
For a representative message, see the before
and after versions of
a message bounced to the moderator and approved for posting.
The mail filter | Hypermail Hypermail
is a program that converts messages in unix mailbox format to
individual HTML documents, sorted and linked by date, thread, subject,
and author. The archive is updated each time an approved message is
returned to the cast10 moderator.
To archive the postings, a .forward file is created in /home/moderator/mail
containing
This will forward every message sent to the moderator to a procmail filter;
if the procmail configuration file (/home/moderatoruserID/mail/.procmailrc) is
set up to include the recipe file /home/moderatoruserID/mail/moderatoruserID/.procmail/rc.maillists,
the incoming messages can be screened by the following filter (the contents of the rc.maillists
file)
which has the effect of searching for the regular expression "To: cast10@" in the
incoming message; if this expression is found, a copy of the message is piped to the
hypermail program which incrementally updates the message archive at the cast10 website.
Another copy is made if the keyword "software" is found; this copy is used to update
a separate set of archived documents, all related to software announcements. Likewise,
the mail messages are searched for additional keywords and other mailing lists managed
by the moderator. A final copy is sent to the moderator.
Notes:
Please note that all of the paths in the description above were used for
illustration purposes only
When removing archived files, be sure to move remaining files so that
the archived files are numbered consecutively, starting from 0000.html
If your operating system uses AFS, be sure your mailer can write to the
directory in which the archives are to reside, i.e., set
