List owners are individuals responsible for list administration via
mail commands. Thus, list owners may be remotely located. Each list has
to have at least one list owner. These owners may be different than the
system's manager, and have special privileges: they may issue commands
on users' behalf (add a user, remove a user, etc.) overriding system restrictions
set on regular users (including overriding disabled commands), obtain reports
about the lists they administer, append to the ".aliases" and
".ignored" files, change the welcoming (".welcome")
and informative (".info") messages, as well as other system files
such as the aliases file (".aliases"), the ".ignored"
file, the subscribers file (".subscribers"), the news file (".news")
and the peers file (".peers"). In addition, they may moderate
their lists and they receive various error messages pertaining to their
lists. All administrative commands are author authenticated and password
protected. Whenever a message cannot be author authenticated, the list's
owner and manager are notified. On the other hand, list owners may not
add restricted users; this service can be provided by contacting the system's
manager. List owners may also receive copies of user commands and/or error
messages such as invalid postings, syntax errors on commands, etc.
List owners may assign various parts of these responsibilities to other
people. List owners may assign moderators, whose function is to approve
messages and guide the on-line discussion, subscription managers, whose
function is to add or remove individuals to the list, and recipients of
error messages, whose function is to contact users who generate error messages
by submitting invalid commands and educate them as to the error, also to
remove users whose addresses are no longer valid.
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