CLASnet: Majordomo Commands
If you are a CLAS list administrator, you should send email to the Majordomo majordomo@clas.ufl.edu email robot to maintain the list. Only the person designated as list master can make changes to the list. If you have been sent to this page to learn how to subscribe to a list, you will send your email to listname-request@clas.ufl.edu.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why aren't the students already subscribed to the mailing list?
At this time, we do not have a method to automatically obtain a course roster from the Registrar's Office. Even if we could obtain such a roster, we do not have a method to find out the students' email addresses, via Gatorlink or otherwise. You must provide your students instructions on how to subscribe themselves, or you must subscribe them.

I have all of my students' email addresses. How may I add them to the mailing list?
There are two methods to "pre-"subscribe a list of people.
  1. Send an email to majordomo@clas.ufl.edu, with a message such as: 
    approve password subscribe listname user1@host.address
approve password subscribe listname user2@host.address
approve password subscribe listname user3@host.address
...
    While repetetive, you could use a macro or a "mail merge" inside of your word processor, create the message, export as ASCII text, then cut/paste the resulting text into your mailing program. Note that any attempt to "attach" a document will result in failure, as it will want to keep the addresses in the word processor's own formatting.
  2. Send an email to consult, with an explanation and a message such as: 
    user1@host.address
user2@host.address
user3@host.address
...
    The list must be in this form -- no commas, no full names, and only one address per line. We can then add the users to the list "behind the scenes", but it must be in exactly this format.

Common Problems

EMail Signatures
Majordomo doesn't understand email signatures. You can either turn yours off when you send the message, or put the word end on the line after the last command--that tells Majordomo to stop processing. To disable the signature in Eudora--just click on the JH {John Hancock} button and set it to None. Most web-mail systems (ie, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) do not allow you to turn off the "signature" advertisement. In this case, you must use the end keyword. 
subscribe list-name
end

Word Wrap
Please remember that you need to turn off word-wrap in your email client. Each command needs to be sent as a single line of text. If your email client doesn't allow that, then you'll have to escape the end-of-line character with a back-slash: 
approve password subscribe list-name \
user@very.long.hostname

HTML Encoding
EMail clients such as Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Outlook default to "HTML encoded" messages. This allows you to send messages with bold, italics, and differently-size text, just like a web page. Unfortunately, these commands confuse the server, so you need to turn them off. Look through the "Options" and/or "Preferences" menu in your program for this.

Hotmail and other web-based email
Hotmail email accounts automatically add an advertisement to the end of every message they send out. In order to prevent some systems from automatically removing the advertisement, Hotmail uses a non-standard method to insert the ad as part of the message body, instead of adding it as a "signature", which email programs know to ignore. Since Majordomo can't recognize it as an ad, yet it starts with a Majordomo "keyword" (ie get), it attempts to run the command, and fails.

To get around this, you need to follow the instructions listed above for signatures and use the end keyword.

Administrative Commands

Changing the list password
passwd list-name old-password new-password

Where list-name is the name of the list, old-password is the current list password, and new-password is to which you'd like to change it.

Finding out who's on the list
who list-name

Where list-name is the name of the mailing list you're interested in.

Adding an email address to the list
approve password subscribe list-name email-address

Where password is the list password described above. You can put multiple subscribe commands in a single message.

Removing an email address from the list
approve password unsubscribe list-name email-address

Other Majordomo commands
help

This will cause Majordomo to send you a list of all the commands it supports. The Gory Details are also available.

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 Last modified: Mon Aug 28 23:39:53 Eastern Daylight Time 2000