7.1 How do I turn mail delivery on or off? (delivery option)

You may wish to temporarily stop getting messages from the list without having to unsubscribe. If you disable mail delivery, you will no longer receive messages, but will still be a subscriber and will retain your password and other settings.

This can be handy in a many different cases. For example, you could be going on vacation or need a break from the list because you're too busy to read any extra mail. Many mailing lists also allow only subscribers to post to the list, so if you commonly send mail from more than one address (eg, one address for at home and another for when you're travelling), you may want to have more than one subscribed account, but have only one of them actually receive mail. You can also use this as a way to read private archives even on a list which may be too busy for you to have sent directly to your mailbox. All you need to do is subscribe, disable mail delivery, and use your password and email to log in to the archives.

To disable/enable mail delivery using the web interface:

  1. Log in to your options page. (See Section 3.1 for instructions.)
  2. Go down to the section marked "Mail delivery" and select "Disabled" to stop receiving mail, and "Enabled" to start receiving mail.

This can also be changed for multiple lists at the same time if you are subscribed to more than one list on the same domain. See Section 10.1 for information about changing settings globally.

To disable/enable mail delivery using the email interface:

  1. Send a mail to with the command set delivery off or set delivery on.

    Commands can appear in either the body or the subject of the message. (See Section 3.2 for more information about sending mail commands.)

  2. Set it to "off" to stop receiving posts, and "on" to start receiving them again.