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Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies

How the mailing list service works: roles and responsibilities

A mailing list service involves four types of roles:

It is possible to have several roles at once (for example, you can be an owner and a moderator of a list and be subscribed to several others).

Listmasters

Listmasters are in charge of the management of the mailing list service. Their duties:

List owners and moderators can turn to listmasters when they face a problem not dealt with by the documentation or for any comment. However, in order not to flood listmasters with messages, it is recommended that subscribers rather turn to list owners.

Owners

The list owner is generally its creator or, failing him/her, the person who requested the list creation or who became responsible for it. His/her role:

A list can have several owners. However, the 'Privileged' profile is reserved to the list's creator; other owners have a 'Normal' profile, which has fewer prerogatives.

Moderators

Moderators are appointed by the list owner. They are in charge of controlling the relevancy of the messages sent to the list: after reading them, they choose to accept or to reject them . Moderation occurs before the message is actually sent to subscribers. Rejection of a message is possibly followed by a notice to the sender in order to explain the reason for that rejection.

A list can have one or several moderators; generally, the list owner is also a moderator.

This concerns only moderated lists.

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