The Lists section in VPOP3 lets you view and manage the various types of 'List' which VPOP3 supports

• Distribution Lists
• Mailing Lists
• Forwardings
• ODBC Mailing Lists
• Groups

A list will contain zero or more 'members' (usually email addresses) which can be messaged all at once. To send a message to all the members of a list, you will usually send an email to the listname at a valid domain.

For instance, if your 'Local Domains' setting is set to mycompany.com;mycompany.org, and your list is called Customers, then you can send a message to all your customers by sending an email to customers@mycompany.com or customers@mycompany.org

All lists except for Groups can also be made public, if you tick the Allow incoming mail to be sent to the list option in the list settings. In this case, for incoming SMTP messages, it uses the same rules as for locally sent messages, but for incoming POP3 messages, it will use the Accepted Domains setting for the mail collector for the list's email address, rather than the Local Domains setting. If the Allow incoming mail to be sent to the list options is not ticked, then any incoming messages to the list's email address will be treated the same as incoming messages to an unrecognised address.

If you want the list to have other names, then you can use mappings to create aliases for the list.

A Distribution List is a simple list containing zero or more email addresses (local or remote).

A Mailing List has a lot more features than a distribution list. For instance, a mailing list supports user subscription and removal from the list, modifying message headers to support discussion lists, banning people from lists, and so on.

Forwardings are not really 'lists', because they can only contain a single email address, but they are managed here because they are, essentially, just a special case of a Distribution List, but with only a single member.

ODBC Mailing Lists are only available in VPOP3 Enterprise.

An ODBC Mailing List is a list where all the members are retrieved from an external ODBC database. VPOP3 cannot manage the list members - that has to be done outside of VPOP3 - but the other features of Mailing Lists are supported.

A Group is a separate type of list which can be used for administrative purposes. For instance, you can set that all members of a particular group cannot send outgoing messages. You can also send emails to all of a group's members, as with a distribution list, but this will only work internally.

Some permissions (eg with calendar sharing in VPOP3 Enterprise) can use a group as the 'target' of the permission - for instance, you could set it so that all members of the 'sales' group have permission to read someone's calendar.

Each user can only be in at most one group, and this is set in the user's settings, rather than in the group settings.

To administer Lists click on the Lists button at the top of the administrator pages. You can add or remove lists by clicking on the New and Delete buttons at the top of the list of Lists.

To edit a particular list, you can double-click on the list name in the list of Lists:

• Distribution Lists
• Mailing Lists
• Forwardings
• ODBC Mailing Lists
• Groups