PMDF User's Guide
OpenVMS Edition

With PMDF DB you can create and maintain your own mailing lists. A mailing list is merely a collection of e-mail addresses with which you associate an alias. Or, looked at a little differently, a mailing list is an alias which expands to a list of e-mail addresses. When you address a mail message to the alias, it actually goes to all of the addressees listed in the mailing list. The act of sending a mail message to a mailing list is referred to as "posting".

A mailing list is created in three steps:

1. Create a text file containing the list of e-mail addresses associated with the mailing list. Each address should be on a separate line in the file. The file itself is referred to as a "mailing list file"; the addresses in the file are the mailing list's membership.
2. Set the protection of the mailing list file so that it is world readable

   $ SET PROTECTION=(W:R) filename

   Here, filename is the name of the mailing list file created in Step 1.

3. Choose an alias name, alias-name , to associate with the mailing list. Then, in PMDF DB, issue the commands

   db> add alias-name "<filename" db> set alias-name public

   filename should include a full path specification including the disk and directory name.

For example, suppose the user sue@example.com wants to set up a mailing list named sample-list. The members of the mailing list will be bob@example.com, judy@example.com, ralph@sample.com, and sue@example.com. Sue first creates the mailing list file D1:[SUE]SAMPLE.DIS which contains the four lines

bob@example.com judy@example.com ralph@sample.com sue@example.com

She then makes sure the distribution file is world readable by explicitly setting its protection with the DCL SET PROTECTION command,

$ SET PROTECTION=(W:R) D1:[SUE]SAMPLE.DIS

Finally, Sue establishes the public alias FOO-LIST as follows:

$ PMDF DB db> add foo-list "<d1:[sue]sample.dis" db> set foo-list public db> show foo-list attributes Key Value ----------- ----------------------------- foo-list <d1:[sue]sample.dis Attributes: public,no-expand,block-receipts,mail-address [1 entries shown] db>

By declaring the list to be public, Sue is allowing other people to post messages to this mailing list. They should do so by addressing their messages to sue+sample-list@example.com. Messages so addressed will then be received by the members of the list as specified by the contents of the file D1:[SUE]SAMPLE.DIS.

At any time you can add or remove members from the mailing list. You do so by simply editing the mailing list file removing or adding addresses from or to it.