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Maintain Your E-list's Membership (Lyris)

This article applies to: E-lists (Lyris)

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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). There are two parts to this.

  • Configure: Tell Lyris what criteria should put an address on "hold" status. Do this once (and update as you see fit).
  • Review: Decide what to do with the addresses that have been put on hold. Do this regularly!

Configure

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."

  1. Log in to the Lyris administrator web interface.
    - How do I log in?
    - Take me to the login page.
  2. On the left, click Utilities.
  3. Hover your pointer over List Settings. A sub-menu will appear.
  4. Click Automatic Maintenance.
  5. The first two items on the 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 the Error Mail tab.
  1. Click the Purging Inactive Members tab.
  2. The first setting here (Purge held) 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.
  3. Click Save when you've finished.

Review

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

If, when configuring your list's settings (the procedure listed 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 administrator web interface.
    - How do I log in?
    - Take me to the login page.
  2. On the left, click Members.
  3. Under Members, click View members.
  4. In the dropdown list, choose Show: held (bad email addresses).
  5. You'll see only the members whose Status is held. At this point you can decide what to do with these "bad" addresses. You have several 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 delete all held addresses by clicking delete all in this view.
  • You can reset an address's status to normal (if you think the problem that caused the "held" status was a temporary one) by following the lettered steps below.
  1. Click on the address.
  2. Click the gray Settings tab.
  3. From the Membership status drop-down, select normal member.
  4. Click save.

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