Adding Many Members

New members may be added to your database in many ways. For single member or small number of member adds, the method described below for adding via email commands works well. However, if you want to add many members at once, you will find it faster to use Utilities: Members: Import Members.

The add command can be easily used to add many members at once. This is done by using any of the line-continuation schemes discussed in the "The Line Continuation Character" section. The syntax below uses the ‘<<’ and ‘>>’ operators to delimit a list of names to be added. The syntax to add many members is:

add listname [quiet] <<
emailaddress1
emailaddress2
>>

The quiet modifier is optional, and works exactly as it does when adding a single member. In the case where you add many members, a single quiet modifier serves to suppress sending a "hello" message to each member.

Alternatively, you can use the "\" or "&" to separate each name, rather than delimiting the entire group. The example below uses "&" to continue the line:

add jazztalk quiet &
user1@example.com &
user2@example.com

If you want to add members with user names, the user name must be before the email address. For example:

add jazztalk quiet <<
   User Name1 user1@example.com
   User Name2 user2@example.com
>>

Note that any text that is not a legal email address is assumed to be a name. For example, if you attempted to add user1@example@com, the address would not be added or shown as part of the list of email addresses successfully added, nor would there be an error message. It would be considered part of the name for the next address to be added if there is one, or ignored.

Updating Member Status

On occasion, you may want to perform a new member import to add any new members which may have joined or to add additional demographic data. When you import a new member file, some of the member statuses may have changed. An example would be someone who was once a "normal" member may have become and "unsubscribed" member.

When performing another import or adding members via email, ListManager will not resubscribe any members who have unsubscribed themselves from the list. Any members who were banned will not be reimported either. Also, all list administrators will maintain their list admin rights after the reimport.

If you are readding members and would like their membership status to be changed so that they receive mail normally, use the subform modifier.

For example:

add jazztalk subform user1@example.com

would change the status of user1@example.com from unsubscribed to normal.