Mailing List Settings

This is a reference for all mailing list settings in Mailster.

The settings are organized in the following tabs:

• General settings
• Mailbox settings
• Sender settings
• Mail content
• List behaviour
• Moderation
• Sending behaviour
• Subscribing
• Archiving
• Notifications
• Tools

General settings

• Mailing list name: Name of the mailing list
• Mailing list email: The email that the mailing list’s members will send their emails to
• Mailing admin email: The administrator will get notified when something goes wrong, must not be the list’s email, and must be a valid email address
• Active: Make sure the list is active (this enables/disables mail retrieving and forwarding)
• Allowed to access emails in frontend: You can publish the archive of emails on your site or hide them

Mailbox settings

Mailster uses a normal email mailbox that can be accessed with IMAP or POP3.
The settings in this section are crucial for a working mailing list. If some settings are not clear to you, ask your mail provider (of the mailing list email you provided in general settings section) for the needed details, or have a look at the listings of popular email providers’ settings.

• Host/Server: The address of the mail server
• User/Login: The user to log in with. In general, the email address or the part of the email address before the @ letter
• Password: The user’s password
• Port: The port number of the mail server
• Protocol: The protocol to use at this server/port
• Secure setting: You can enable a secure connection when the server supports this feature
• Use secure authentication: Some servers require secure authentication
• Special parameters: Not always needed. A common “special” parameter is /novalidate-cert, which disables the verification of the email server’s certificate. This is needed for self-signed certificates.

Attention!
Please use a dedicated mailbox for Mailster. Any emails in it will be treated as mailing list emails and therefore send out to the recipients. Thus, do not use your personal email accounts, create/use a different email account.

Sender settings

You have two choices here: to use your normal mailbox sender (the one Joomla uses and which is configured in the ‘Global Configuration’).
The other way (which is recommended) is to use an SMTP server.

• Use Joomla mailer: The following settings are only relevant if you don’t want to use the Joomla mailer.
• Host/Server: The address of the mail server
• User/Login: The user to log in with. In general, the email address or the part of the email address before the @ letter
• Password: The user’s password
• Port: The port number of the mail server
• Secure setting: You can enable a secure connection when the server supports this feature
• Use secure authentication: Some servers require secure authentication

Mail content

• Subject prefix text: Text to insert before the subject
• Clean up subject: If active, the subject of replies will be normalized so that no “Re: Re:” chains occur
• Convert email format to: The emails sent to the mailing list can be converted to a unified format
• Text version in HTML emails: When the format of the emails is HTML it is a good idea to include a text format version
• Custom header: Text to insert before the body: one field for HTML emails and one for text emails. You can use text variables here (see below).
• Custom footer: Text to insert after the body: one field for HTML emails and one for text emails. You can use text variables here (see below).
• Disable “powered by Mailster” mail footer: The footer can be disabled in the Essential/Business/Ultimate Edition

You can add custom elements to the emails posted to the mailing list.
Besides normal text, you can use text variables to insert text dynamically. They function as placeholders for dynamic content.

These are the available variables:

• {email} Sender’s email
• {name} Sender’s name
• {description} Senders’ description (if found in Mailster’s user data)
• {date} Email send date/time
• {list} List’s name
• {post_email} List’s email address
• {admin_email} List administrator’s email address
• {site} Joomla site name
• {unsubscribe} Link to the unsubscribe page
• {recip_email} Recipient’s email (not working with BCC/CC addressing*)
• {recip_name} Recipient’s name (not working with BCC/CC addressing*)

* You can only use the recipient-specific text variables when you use the “No BCC/CC addressing, send one mail per recipient” addressing method.
Only then can the recipient-specific personalization be done.

The variables can be used in the subject, the custom headers, and the custom footers.
If you want to create nice unsubscribe links use the {unsubscribe} variable as the link location:

Note that some text editors automatically insert the site’s location (URL) in front of non-external links.
Thus, the {unsubscribe} link might be saved as http://www.example.com/{unsubscribe}.
As this leads to undesirable results, we recommend deactivating the respective text editor setting.

List behaviour

The settings in this tab largely determine how the list works and how it can be used.

• Mail copy to sender: Copy of the sent mail to the sender On/Off
• Email size limit: You can specify the maximum email size (in kByte) for the mailing list emails. If you want to e.g. limit the email size to 5 MB, enter 5000 for this setting. If the email size is larger than the defined limit, the emails are not forwarded to the recipients. Zero means that there is no limit.
• Email content filtering: If activated, emails are not forwarded that contain certain disallowed keywords. These words are configured in Mailster’s configuration. (Essential/Business/Ultimate Edition only)
• Allowed to send/post: Decide whether your mailing list should be public (also non-subscribers can post) or that you want to restrict the valid senders (based on their email addresses). Emails from unauthorized senders are blocked and not forwarded.

Moderation

Use the moderation functionality (Business/Ultimate Edition only) to guard your lists against inappropriate content such as spam, off-topic discussions, or unwanted solicitations.
The list administrator gets informed about a new message to be moderated. Approvals or rejections can either be done via (clicking) links in the emails sent to the moderator, or in the Mailster email archive in the admin area.

• Moderation Mode: Switch the moderation on/off. You can either moderate all messages or only those of a specific user group.
• Auto-Approve (Whitelist): Maybe you trust some senders more than others; with the auto-approval, you can avoid that every message needs to be approved.
• Notifications: You can decide to keep the sender of the moderated email informed about the process by turning on notifications about the moderation and the moderator’s decision (approval/rejection).

Sending behaviour

• Recipient addressing: In general, it is recommended to use the BCC recipient addressing to send emails to large recipient groups efficiently.
  If activated, one “physical” mail is used to send it to as many recipients as defined in the setting BCC recipients per mail.
  Otherwise, each recipient gets a “physical” mail.
  Commonly, you have to use SMTP sending and not the PHP mail function in order to use BCC addressing. If your Joomla system does not use SMTP for outgoing emails you probably need to configure Mailster to use a SMTP server for sending.
  Note: Some mail providers and ISPs have restrictions regarding the number of BCC recipients.
• From email address: Choose whether the mailing list’s email address or the sender’s email address is used as the from address of the sent emails. Note: Some mail servers do not accept an overwrite of the from address. Recommended setting due to the DMARC requirements: Mailing list address
• From name: Same option as From email address, only applies to the name of the sender
• Reply-To header: Determine the target address for replies to the mailing list emails. Note: it is a good idea to try out the different options to see which settings fit your purposes best.
• Bounces destination: Bounced emails are automatic replies to mailing list emails, such as Out-of-Office emails and Delivery-Status-Notifications (e.g., Notification regarding a failed delivery).
  Bounced emails are, in general, not intended to go to the mailing list subscribers. Therefore, Mailster drops them when they return to the mailbox. This consumes, especially on larger lists, quite some computational efforts. In order to avoid this you can provide an email address where the bounces should go. Note: some email servers allow to overwrite this setting, some don’t.
• Max. send attempts: When errors occur during the send process, it is later retried to send the mail
• Send reports: For verification/debugging, the email sending process can be recorded. The send reports, when existing for an email, can be viewed in the email archive in the entry of the respective email:
  

Subscribing

• Allow subscription: Subscribing through the subscriber plugin/module on/off. When set to No/off, users can only be added to the mailing list in the backend.
• Public subscription: Allow subscribing when user is not logged-in on/off. When set to No/off only registered, logged-in users are able to subscribe to the mailing list.
• Use Double Opt-In subscribe: The Double Opt-In method requires the subscriber to confirm their subscription (by clicking a link in an email) before the subscription process is complete. (Essential/Business/Ultimate Edition only)
• Send welcome message on subscribe: When a person subscribes to a mailing list, an automated welcome message can be sent out.
• Send welcome message when added in backend: When an admin adds a person to a mailing list in the backend, an automated welcome message can be sent out.
• Allow unsubscription: Unsubscribing through the subscriber plugin/module on/off. When set to No/off, users can only be removed from the mailing list in the backend.
• Use Double Opt-In unsubscribe: The Double Opt-In method requires the subscriber to confirm their unsubscription (by clicking a link in an email) before the unsubscription process is complete. (Essential/Business/Ultimate Edition only)
• Send goodbye message on subscribe: When a person unsubscribes from a mailing list, an automated goodbye message can be sent out.
• Send goodbye message when removed in backend: When an admin removes a person from a mailing list, an automated goodbye message can be sent out.
• Allow digest: Subscribers are allowed to choose whether they want to receive the mailing messages in (daily/weekly/monthly) digests. (Business/Ultimate Edition only)

Archiving

• Disable email archiving: You can disable the archiving of the mailing list emails (Essential/Business/Ultimate Edition only)
• Archive Retention: By default, emails are kept indefinitely in the archive. You can also choose to auto-delete the emails (incl. attachment files) after a defined number of days. (Essential/Business/Ultimate Edition only)
• Archive to digest articles: All emails can be archived by copying them into Joomla articles
  • Author: The Joomla user under whose name the digest article is published
  • Category: The Joomla category under which the digest article is published
  • State: The state of the digest article (published/unpublished/archived)
  • Access: The access/permission setting under which the digest article is published
• Offline archiving: The messages in the email archive can be moved to an offline archive to clean up the live database. However, this makes the messages unavailable for access through the frontend archive.

Notifications

• Notify senders of not forwarded emails: If an email is not forwarded (e.g., because the email address is not allowed to send or the email is filtered because of its content), the sender can be notified.
• Custom notifications (Essential/Business/Ultimate Edition only): You can create custom email notifications for the following events:
  • New email/post
  • Sender blocked
  • Bounced email
  • Filtered email
  • User subscribed
  • User unsubscribed
  • Send error
  One of the following recipients (or recipient groups) can be notified:
  • Joomla user – a certain user
  • List administrator – the mailing list’s administrator
  • User group – one Mailster user group

Tools

The tools section offers some specific functionality that you probably will not need every day.
It is recommended to only use it when you know exactly what it does or if the support tells you to do so.