E-lists at Cornell

Maintaining Your E-list (Lyris)

One of your responsibilities as a list administrator is to keep your membership roster accurate and up-to-date. Lyris will help you by keeping track of the addresses that have problems (like not accepting mail delivery).

• Configuring your list's settings

You need to decide how many problems an address is allowed before the member is put on hold; Lyris will not send messages to a member on hold. You also need to decide what happens after a member's status is changed to held.

• Handling "held" members

You should review members' status regularly and decide what to do with the ones who have been changed to "held"

Configuring your list's settings

1. Log in to the Lyris ListManager web interface
   
   
2. In the row of blue tabs, click on Utilities
   
   
3. Click on List Settings
   
   
4. Click on Automatic Maintenance
   
   
5. The first two items on the gray Error Mail tab determine how members are put on hold. For nearly every list, using the default settings on this tab is a good idea.
   
   
   

• Hold users defaults to yes. This means that Lyris will put members on hold when their address has repeated problems. (If you set Hold users to no, you won't know which addresses are causing problems.)
  
• Bounce limit defaults to 5. Lyris keeps track of consecutive delivery problems for each member address. So, with the default setting, if five messages in a row can't be delivered to a particular address, that address will be put on hold.
  
• We strongly recommend that you do not change any of the other settings on this tab.

6. Click on the gray Purging Inactive Members tab
   
   
   
   
7. The first setting here controls how long a member can be on hold before Lyris automatically removes that address from the list. Changing this to purge after XX days (you get to choose how many days) tells Lyris to put off removing members from your list for that many days, giving you the opportunity to review the held addresses and identify members who shouldn’t be removed. You should set this to a value less than one month, and be sure to check the held members more frequently than your setting.
   
   
8. Click save when you've finished.

Handling "held" members

If, when configuring your list's settings as described above, you told Lyris to automatically remove "held" addresses, there's nothing for you to do here. But if you kept the never purge default, you should review members' status and decide whether, for each held address, to remove it from the list or restore it to normal membership.

1. Log in to the Lyris ListManager web interface
   
   
   
   
2. On the left, under Members, click on View
   
   
   
   
3. In the drop-down list next to the go button, choose Show: held (bad email addresses), then click go
   
   
   
   
4. At this point you can decide what to do with these "bad" addresses. You have many options:

• You can try to contact each member by phone or other means before deciding whether to keep or delete each address.
• You can delete addresses you're sure are bad by clicking delete on each address's line.
• You can reset an address's status to normal by clicking on the address, then clicking on the gray Settings tab, then choosing normal member in the Membership status drop-down list, then clicking save.
• You can delete all held addresses by clicking on the delete all in this view button.