This FAQ is to help explain the Sophocles Mail Manager .

What is the Sophocles Mail Manager ?

The Sophocles Mail Manager is a web interface to The Open Group's email/mailing list management database . This is used for mailing lists and also access control to The Open Group web site. It allows users to create and maintain mailing lists, and also to access mail archives.

What are the three levels of facilities for Sophocles

1. User (the default).
   This level provides the ability access the email archives for all mailing lists to which you are subscribed. The Manage Lists link or Show Users Lists button within this level allows you to manage your subscriptions, allowing you to flip your subscription to web only, or to unsubscribe, and to see the subscriber list if its available.
2. Maintainer .
   This level additionally allows basic maintenance facilities, including user and mailing list creation, but updating lists is constrained to those mailing lists to which you have been granted maintainer status. A maintainer's User Guide is available [PDF]. This set of html pages concentrates on Maintainer capabilities. Maintainers who are not Open Group staff need to be authorized by The Open Group webmaster in order for maintainer privileges to be assigned.
3. Postmaster.
   This level additionally allows user and list deletion, the maintenance of all lists and the update and maintenance of user records include user id merging, deduplication, staff id updates etc.

How long does it take for changes to take effect ?

Updating the Sophocles database controls both the mail system and also the web servers where access is controlled by mailing list membership. The former is effective within about 1 minute; the latter within about 30 minutes.

What is an Embedded Mailing list?

It is possible to embed a list as a subscriber in a mailing list, in addition to individual users. This is often useful when creating related mailing lists. It should be noted that this can only be done to one level of nesting.

What is a List Maintainer?

One or more individuals can be designated as maintainer(s) of a list. Users who are not members of staff at The Open Group need to apply to the webmaster for maintainer status. There is one list maintainer who is designated as the owner to receive mail bounces and notifications from the list.

Maintainer Facilities:

20 Apr 2005