The more time passes, the more customers need to have correct mailing lists and software.
By default, cPanel servers have Mailman software and managed mailing lists.

1. What is a Mailman mailing list and what is is for?

In general:
A mailing list is an “e-mail service” that forwards messages, that are sent to the mailing list address, to all e-mail addresses, that are in this list. As a rule, people with common interests gather in one mailing list in order to communicate on topics related to their hobby or interest. At the same time, mailing lists can also be successfully used as a customer base, where information and newsletters or product offers are sent to customers through mailing lists. Mailing lists can also be used, for example, to offer a service, where, for example, a logistics company brings together all the customers/companies that transport goods and forwards offers/jobs. The Mailman mailing list is easy to manage and meets today’s requirements for bulk mailing, with an “unsubscribe” header and proper “bounce monitoring” (automatic list management).

Why are the mailing lists needed:
– Most e-mail servers no longer receive mail if there are more than 30-50 recipients on the TO or CC or BCC line (mailing list sends mail per user)
(When sending e-mail such way, e-mail servers may return error messages or add the sender’s e-mail address to international blacklists)
– Most e-mail servers do not accept e-mail if more than 40 e-mails are sent from the same domain to the same e-mail server (for example, Google e-mail servers)
– Many “customer databases” (for example client lists on the sender’s computer) are not moderated and they contain old contacts, either the e-mail address in the list has changed or no longer exists
(Managing such “customer base/contact list” on your own computer is often relatively time consuming, especially if it contains more than 300 addresses. Sending e-mails to non existing addresses can be exhausting for e-mail server and this can result in blocking e-mail server as well as blocking your domain internationally!)
– Letters sent to the “contact list” do not have a simple possibility to remove the recipient from the list
(It should be mentioned, that it is no longer year 2008! In other words, some of the largest e-mail servers require presence of ABUSE or unsubscribe marks in e-mails, the possibility for the recipient to remove him/her from the e-mail list, so that no more e-mails will be sent to him/her. If it is present, the recipient of the letter can do it himself/herself, with no need to send back a letter to the sender and hope that his/her address will be removed – this again increases the trust/value of the letter!)
– Easy to manage your contact list from one place (possibility to always add/remove contacts)

2. How to create a mailing list?

1. Enter cPanel (instructions can be found HERE)
2. Move to: EMAIL > Mailing Lists

3. Under “Create a Mailing List” fill in the mailing list name, select the domain and the password required for administrating the list.

In addition, indicate whether the mailing list is private or public!
(NB: Anyone can join the public mailing list and it has its own administration page. If you have a list of your customers to which you add new contacts by yourself, then we recommend using the “private” flag.)
4. By clicking on the button “Add” – your mailing list will be created.

NB! After creating a mailing list, make sure that your e-mail address is listed as the owner of the mailing list!
To do this, go no the same page to:
Desired mailing list > Manage > “mailing list administration” General Options > kontrollige välja “The list administrator email addresses”
(This is necessary in order to get feedback on what is happening in the mailing list and to accept new subscribers and manage the mailing list if necessary!)

3. How to manage a mailing list?

Through a domain name
1. Mailing lists visible to the public
The management interface address is in the form of: https://yourdomain.com/mailman/admin/ (displays all publicly visible mailing lists under the domain)
2. Private (hidden mailing lists)
The management interface address is in the form of: https:/yourdomain.com/mailman/admin/LISTNAME_YOURDOMAINNAME.COM (where the name of the mailing list is the name given/allocated to the given mailing list and the domain name is the name of the domain you are using without the www prefix)
NB! To use a mailing list, you need a mailing list administrator password and/or rights delegated to your e-mail account.

Through webmail
If your local domain email account has been granted/delegated the right to manage the mailing list:
1. Enter webmail (webmail address is in form of webmail.yourdomain.com)
2. Click on your webmail username in the top right corner to open the user menu
3. Click on the “Mailing Lists” link (NB! If the corresponding link does not appear in the user menu, you have not been delegated the rights to manage the mailing list!)

Through cPanel (most common method)
1. Enter cPanel (instructions can be found HERE)
2. Move to: EMAIL > Mailing Lists

4. Click the “Manage” link on the desired mailing list row
After that, you will see the following view:

Information about mailing list features:

Configuration Categories all
– General options
General mailing list settings for mailing list name, administrators, password notifications, message sizes, reply-to addresses and more.
– Passwords
Manage passwords of mailing list main user, administrators and list sender roles
– Language options
Manage general language options and other language options
– Membership management
View users who have joined the mailing list and their assigned roles and settings, and add new or remove old users, as well as change/update their email addresses
– Non-digest options
Manage advanced settings for “direct mail” messages (that does not require moderation)
– Digest options
– Privacy options…
Manage mailing list privacy settings, spam settings, and more.
(Under “Advertise this list when people ask what lists are on this machine?” you can specify whether your mailing list will appear on the general information page under your domain!)
– Bounce processing
Settings, how the mailing list behaves in case of returned messages and non-existent addresses
(For example, after which period mailing list automatically removed a non-existent email address from the general list)
– Archiving Options
Whether and when messages sent to the mailing list are archived
– Auto-responder
Whether and under what conditions a letter is sent to the sender in the mailing list and what the letter contains.
– Content filtering
Whether and which attachments or words can go through the mailing list and which ones will be removed

Other Administrative Activities all
– Tend to pending moderator requests
All activities that need moderation – allowing messages to the mailing list, allowing subscribers, etc.
– Edit the public HTML pages and text files
In case of a public mailing list, the possibility to change the web view of the mailing list
– Go to list archives
Messages in the archive are displayed here

4. Examples/additional information

If you have a public mailing list:
– Mailing list address is in the form of: https://yourdomain.com/mailman/listinfo/
– Mailing list management interface address is in the form of: https://yourdomain.com/mailman/admin

The links below are visible for both open and private mailing lists, but they do not appear on previous links!
– The address of the mailing list administration interface is in the form of: https://yourdomain.com/mailman/admin/listname_yourdomain.com (NB! Requires a password for the mailing list created during creation!)
– Mailing list address is in the form of: https://yourdomain.com/mailman/listinfo/listname_yourdomain.com
(It is also possible to join the mailing list there, as well as the subscriber to manage his/her settings)

Sample applications to join the mailing list from your page:
1. Create an HTML or PHP file in your home directory that contains the following code:

2. Now add a PHP file named list_command.php to the same directory that contains the following code:

NB! “list_name” ja “list_domain” data should be replaced with your mailing list information!

NB! By default, mailing lists require user approval to join the mailing list – we recommend that you do not change this requirement, as otherwise the mailing list may become overloaded with spam bots or start sending spam. (With the last case, access to your website will be blocked and / or your account will be closed)
NB! By adding the code to the page in this way, you MUST definitely add additional Google reCaptcha to this script to prevent spam bots from “mass subscribe” to your mailing list! You can find more information about the additional authenticator: HERE

5. Questions/Answers

K: “I have sent an email to the mailing list with an attachment, but it didn’t pass due to the size of the attachment/message?”
V: Most likely the attachment + the size of the entire message was larger than the default setting. You can change this in the following place:
cPanel > EMAIL > Mailinglists > near the desired mailing list choose “Manage” > General options > Additional settings under “Maximum length in kilobytes (KB) of a message body. Use 0 for no limit.”
NB! We certainly do not recommend setting it to 0, but a reasonable size, for example for a letter of 15 MB, the number should be: 15000
(On the server side, there is no difference in how large attachment moves to the mailing list, but most e-mail providers do not allow to receive e-mails larger than 15-25 MB!)
——————————-
K: “I wish, that if administrator sends a letter, it will not be forwarded for moderation, is it possible??”
V: Yes:
1. In cPanel choose EMAIL > Mailinglists > near the desired mailing list choose “Manage” > General options under “The list administrator email addresses.” make sure the administrator’s email address is in this list. If not, it should be added!
2. In cPanel choose EMAIL > Mailinglists > near the desired mailing list choose “Manage” > “Membership Management”. Check that the “mod” box for this user is selected. If yes, then this box should be empty for this user!
——————————-
K: “I see that this mailing list and administration are in English – is it be possible to add Estonian and some other another language there as well?”
V: Yes, it is possible. Mailman mailing lists support multiple languages.

In cPanel choose EMAIL > Mailing Lists > near the desired mailing list choose “Manage” > “List mailing list administration” then choose “Language options”
(It is possible to save/change the general language of the list (incl. language of administrative page) as well as add different language options for users!)
——————————-
K: “Does Mailman also allow import / export of contacts from a file – it is very annoying to enter/remove them one by one?”
V: Yes, the mass “subscribe” and mass “removal” options are fully available in Mailman:
In cPanel choose EMAIL > Mailing Lists > Membership Management > and then “Mass Subscriptions” or “Mass Removals”
NB! For “Mass Subscriptions”, it is good practice to leave “Send welcome messages to new subscribers? – Yes” selected because it sends notifications to the user with mailing list information as well as initial instructions!
——————————-
K: “I’m using your Mailman mailing list, but since the first newsletters were sent, a lot of “unsubscribe” messages have started to appear. However, when interacting with users, they did not want to leave the mailing list. Why these notifications are coming and what to do next?”
V: Mailman doesn’t remove anyone from the mailing list by itself! We’ve seen this in the following cases:
1. The person has removed himself/herself from the mailing list by himselt/herself
2. The mailing list has an invalid or outdated email address (In this case, you should check with the user to see if the specific email address still exists!)
In the last case, we have seen that mass mailings are sent to addresses such as @mail.ee or @hot.ee, although they no longer exist and users have started using either company addresses @companyname or users have switched to @hotmail.com or @gmail.com without updating their contact email addresses in the sender’s newsletter mailing list.
In this case, the corresponding invalid e-mail addresses are scanned by Mailman’s automatic maintenance (after some “bounce messages”, not after the first one), which also removes these addresses. Sending mail with a mailing list is definitely not “quantity equal to quality” (more e-mail addresses in the list is definitely not equal to better results)!
——————————-
K: “I have a list/database of contacts purchased from the Business Register/elsewhere, can I also use it in Mailman software?”
V: Although it is theoretically possible to use it there, we do not recommend doing so! In fact, we also don’t recommend doing this by adding email addresses from these lists to your email application on the TO, BCC, or CC line!
——————————-