Child List

This setting determines if this mailing list will accept message submitted directly from another mailing list. By default, ListManager rejects messages sent from other mailing lists and this setting overrides that default.

This option is used to create parent/child mailing lists, where sending mail to a parent list automatically sends to a child mailing list.

A typical scenario for setting up parent/child list is if you have multiple announcement lists and they are related in this way. For example, if you have these lists:

sports-announcements
soccer-announcements
tennis-announcements

These are logically in a parent/child relationship. If you send to "sports-announcements" and you want the members of "soccer-announcements" and "tennis-announcements" to get the message. Or, you may just want to send to "tennis-announcements" and not to any other list.

Here are the instructions for setting up a parent/child list. Please follow these directions carefully, as the relationship is a little difficult to grasp:

1) First, create your parent and child lists as you would create any ordinary lists (you will later establish the parent-child relation between them). You should not use headers or footers in any list that will act as a parent, as these header/footers will be reproduced when the messages are posted to the children and this can be confusing.

Set each list (except for the top-level parent) to have "Child: yes" set and also the have "Cross-postings and Duplicates" set to have multiple copies of cross-postings removed. This 2nd setting is important, as it instructs ListManager to make sure that people who are members of multiple lists only receive one copy of a message sent to parent/child lists.

Both lists must keep archives for at least one day for ListManager to purge duplicate messages.

2) Decide who should be able to post to your mailing lists and make them a member of all the lists (parents and children) that their message should be distributable to. A person has to be a member of the parent and all its children in order for the message to be distributed. You should also set the security permissions for this person so that their post goes through the security tests you decide. For instance, you may want to allow any post from the person to automatically be approved, in which case making this member a list admin on the lists is best.

3) In each list that is to serve as a parent list, subscribe the child list's posting address as a member of the parent list. For example, you would create two members in "sports-announcements", with the email addresses "soccer-announcements@yourserver.com" and "tennis-announcements@yourserver.com". Child lists can also act as parents to other lists, so you can nest the parent/child relationship as deeply as you like.

If you have configured the lists to reject cross-posted duplicates, you will prevent members of multiple child lists from getting many copies when a message is sent via the parent list. However, this feature will only work if : 1) you do not include mail-merged footers in the parent, and 2) the messages are at least 240 characters long.