Lyris User's Guide
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Significant New Features in v4.0
Table of Contents
· Introduction
· Email Commands
· Web Interface for Users
· Server Administrator
· Site Administrator
· List Administrator
· Other Topics
· Add-On Packages
· Installing and Upgrading
· Appendix
· · What is New in this Version?
· · · New in version 4.0
· · · · Major new features in v4.0
· · · · Important New Features in v4.0
· · · · Significant New Features in v4.0
· · · · Notable Improvements in v4.0
· · · · Other Improvements in v4.0
· · · New in release version v3.0
· · · New in 3.0 beta 5 (v2.548)
· · · New in 3.0 beta 4 (v2.547)
· · · New in 3.0 beta 3 (v2.545)
· · · New in 3.0 beta 2 (v2.543)
· · · New in 3.0 beta 1 (v2.542)
· · · New in Version 2.5
· · · New in Version 2.0
· · · New in Version 1.2
· · Software License Agreement
· Frequently Asked Questions

Significant New Features in v4.0

Review options to obtain reports by type of member: Several options for the "review" command allow you to obtain subsets of your member list according to the type of member. These are: review listname all, review listname held, review listname full, review listname names, review listname unsub, review listname private, review listname expired, review listname confirm. See Review.

Header/footers can be defined for entire site or server: At the server config and site level you can define headers or footers which will be appended to every list under the level. For example, this could be used to add advertising footers or legal disclaimers to all mailing lists on a server. See Server Headers and Footers and Create Site.

Member id, site, list document caching for increased speed: Internal caching of these database items results in vastly increased speed for certain kinds of functions, such as mail sending, subscribing, adding members, and administrator email commands. With respect to the member id cache, enabling this feature requires approx. 15mb RAM for every 100,000 members on your server. These features are available on all versions of Lyris List Manager, even the free version, and the speed improvement offered by each is displayed in the Server Statistics page. See Member Cache .

New windows installer: A brand new Lyris List Manager installation program installs Lyris List Manager for you, and makes the process of email server and web server coexistence extremely easy. It also makes it very easy to upgrade to the Lyris List Manager SQL version (when it becomes available) and copy all your existing data onto your SQL server.

Lyris List Manager extension mechanism for subscribe/unsubscribe: You can write your own extensions for subscribing and unsubscribing, which can be useful for instantaneously synchronizing Lyris List Manager with some external database, or perhaps to add additional security to your subscription mechanism. For example, you could require new subscribers to your list to fill out a form, and reject email subscriptions until the person has filled out the form. See Programming Extensions at the List Level.

Unsubbed members are marked as "unsub" rather than deleted: Members who unsubscribed are no longer deleted from the database. Instead they now have their status change to "unsub" and remain in the database. This allows Lyris List Manager to track on subscription rates over time. Each list has an option to purge unsubscribe members after a certain number of days, which defaults to 35 days. Members who unsubscribed and then re-subscribed with the same email address will have their old membership automatically deleted so that the new status does not have any negative effect. The "which" command will now to you what lists you are a member of and what lists you are unsubscribed from. The members page now has a category for viewing unsubscribed members. When a member unsubscribes from a list, if they were already unsubscribed, Lyris List Manager simply tells them once again that they are unsubscribed. Previously, Lyris List Manager had deleted the membership when the member unsubscribed a second time, it would give the member an error telling them that they were not a member. This could often frustrate people who thought they were not being unsubscribed, so this new technique will no longer frustrate people. See Purge Unsubscribed, Determine Membership Settings, Selection Type.

Option to subscribe and set at the same time: Now when a member subscribes to a Lyris List Manager list, member settings can be set at the same time. Thus, there is no need to "subscribe" as the first step and "set" as the second step. Any option you use with "set" is now acceptable in "subscribe". See Change Membership Settings.

Dozens of utility programs now available: We have added many new scripts to the contrib. page. See http://www.lyris.com/down/scripts.html

Script to integrate subscribing with your web site: The Lyris List Manager distribution now comes with a script you can use to ease the subscribe/unsubscribe process for your list members. The "submany.pl" script is a Perl/CGI script that can be seamlessly integrated into your web page so your members can easily sign up or sign off your lists. See Allowing Users to Subscribe from a Web Form.

Firewall improvements, and new HELOTEXT option: Lyris List Manager no longer refuses to start up if you don't have reverse dns enabled, instead it displays a warning (but displays a firewall-specific warning if NAT is being used). Also, when behind a firewall, the admin can use "lyris helotext xxx.xxx.com" to define what text is sent with the smtp helo command, so that reverse dns does not need to be set up for Lyris List Manager behind a firewall. See The Lyris List Manager command line.

New recip.nameemail tag: The $subst('Member.nameemail') tag has been around for several versions: now the 'nameemail' tag is also available for recipients. See Recipient Fields .

Ability to change the mail retry schedule: There is now a "retrytiming" command line option, which allows you to specify the retry schedule (and number of retries). The default is pre-set to "lyris retrytiming 30,120,240,480,960". This is more responsive for most sites, as before Lyris List Manager was on a 4 hour fixed retry pattern. Thus, if there is a small problem, the new retry schedule sends the second attempt in a half-hour, so the message is delivered much more quickly. See Setting Server Options.

Option to disable regex bad mail filters: You can now disable the built-in regular expression filters that reject common types of spam or autoreply mail. You can specify which filters you wish to disable: subject, from, and the first lines of the message. When you disable the filters, you are allowing incoming messages to bypass the built-in detection Lyris List Manager provides, such as "out of the office" autoresponders. See Disable From: Checking, Disable Subject: Checking, and Disable first line Checking .

Email command to get email message by date: The "get" command now supports date based retrieval of digests, which allow you to retrieve the digest of a specific list for a certain day. See Get Documents.

Date unsubscribed member field: Unsubscribed members are now kept in the database for a variable amount of time. With that in mind, the database has been augmented to include a "date unsubscribed" field, which is very useful in analyzing the growth of your lists. These fields are used internally by Lyris List Manager to generate portions of the Sub/Unsub/Confirmation Reports.

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