Frequently Asked Questions

- What is Mojo Mail?
- What does Mojo Mail do?
- How does Mojo Mail save its information?
- Does Mojo Mail support the saving of more than the email address?
- Who develops Mojo Mail
- How is Mojo Mail developed? Can I help? Is there a CSV server I can check in/out of?

## What is Mojo Mail?

Mojo Mail is a light-weight, fully featured announce-only Mailing List Manager. It does also support discussion lists, with the help of the mojo_send.pl script. Discussion support is minimal, compared to its announce-only capabilities.

Mojo Mail is primarily run as a plain old CGI script, it does not need any special modules installed, except the one it comes with. It does not run as a mod_perl enabled script and needs no special treatment. If you can run CGI scripts on your hosting account, Mojo Mail will work for you.

## What does Mojo Mail do?

Mojo Mail takes care of much of the drudgery of maintaining a mailing list. It primarily does three things very very well:

- List Subscriptions
  Mojo will take care of subscriptions and unsubscriptions from each list it manages. Subscription and Unsubscription requests are done via web forms on web pages. Would-be subscribers fill out a form with their email address.

  When submitted, Mojo Mail will take the request and email a confirmation. This email confirmation will include a special URL that includes a special 'pin' number, which is used to confirm the correct person wants to subscribe. Following this link will subscribe the email address.

  Unsubscription is a similar process, where someone who wants to unsubscribe will fill out a web form with their email address and receive a confirmation email.

  Mojo Mail does not support email confirmation. That is, confirming an address by having to replying to an email. The URL confirmation is usually much simpler and doesn't make you create an alias email that goes to a program that does the confirmation. We circumvent quite a bit of complexity this way.

  Mojo Mail can be configured to do these two simple things in a variety of ways. Mojo Mail also takes account of if the email is already subscribed to the list, if the email is 'blacklisted' and thus unable to subscribe, invalid emails, and a plethora of 'gotchas' when dealing with these things.

- Message Sending
  Mojo Mail can send List Messages; email messages that go to the entire mailing list. Mojo Mail can use the sendmail program to use to mail to, as well as qmail, exim and smail - anything that masquerades as the sendmail program (usually located at /usr/sbin/sendmail) will work. Mojo Mail can also send out list messages using an SMTP connection to a SMTP server.

  Message sending can also be done in 'batches' a desired amount of emails are sent in timed intervals.

- Archiving
  Mojo Mail can archive all list messages it sends. Archived messages are archived with the list message, its subject and the date it was sent. No header information is saved. Mojo Mail also allows you to view these archives online, and provides a many features to make this quite a pleasant experience.

## How does Mojo Mail save its information?

Mojo Mail saves its information in many different files, in two formats, plain text and DB_File.

The list subscription list is saved in a plain text file, with one email per line. The file is called 'list_name.list' where 'list_name' is the name of your list, with underscores instead of spaces. Blacklists are stored in a similar way, but with a 'blacklist' extension.

DB_Files are used to saved list information and to archive messages. Mojo Mail is flexible in what DB_File package you use, be it DB_File, GDBM, ODBM, or SDBM

list information is stored with one preference per key, archived messages are saved with the date sent as the key, looking like: 20010308151009 (YYYYMMDDHHMMSS) with the value being the subject, the message and then the message format, delimited by double colons '::'

## Does Mojo Mail support the saving of more than the email address?

No. At the present time, only the email address is saved. Fields such as First Name, Last Name, Street Address, Zip Code, etc aren't. There are tentitive plans to create this, but it would mean quite a major overhaul of the program.

## Who develops Mojo Mail

Justin Simoni is the lead designer of Mojo Mail. Many other people have helped out along the way, but most everything is the work of his grubby little hands.

## How is Mojo Mail developed? Can I help? Is there a CSV server I can check in/out of?

Mojo Mail is developed internally. If you want to make a change, or submit a bug fix/patch, just email Justin at justin@skazat.com. There is plans on opening up a CSV server for Mojo Mail, but we're lazy and not too bright on how to use a CVS server.