List Group Definition

The list group wizard lets you edit the settings of an existing list group.

Note: A list group is only fully editable while it is "empty", meaning that there are no subscribers or any lists in the group. For a non-empty group, only certain settings are editable.

The wizard has four pages: General, Profile Fields, Profile Field Details, and Summary.

The top row of the wizard displays links to these four pages. The page that is currently open is highlighted. Depending on the choices made on some of the wizard pages, other pages may become disabled or may be shown in different versions. If a wizard page is disabled, then it means that this page is not necessary with the current choices and can safely be ignored.

General Page: Name and Advanced List Group Settings

This screen defines the general settings of the list group:

• Name: The name of the list group is used both internally in LISTSERV Maestro as well as displayed externally to subscribers as the name of the list group's website. The name must be unique. Maestro checks this uniqueness across list groups and standalone lists, i.e. the list group name must neither be used for another list group nor for another standalone list.

Advanced Settings

• LISTSERV Interface Link: Define if additional links to the LISTSERV Archive pages shall appear in the subscriber area. If checked, then these additional links can be used by subscribers to switch over to the LISTSERV Archive pages without having to login separately; therefore, they can view any LISTSERV list archive that is accessible. Consequently, enabling this option only makes sense if the list group contains any Hybrid Subscriber Lists for which an archive is available.

  Note: This option on the General page is only available if it has previously been enabled by the Maestro administrator (this is a setting in the Administration Hub).

• External Download: The subscribers can be downloaded via an external download URL, i.e. an URL that can be accessed without first logging in to Maestro. This external download URL is a so called "external trigger" of the type "Simple URL Access", with the download data in the body of the HTTP response (in form of a ZIP file). See below for more details about external triggers and what this means in detail.

  For the external trigger, a special security token is required. Each list group has a unique download security token.

  Important: Everyone who is in possession of this security token and who can also access Maestro on its HTTP port (for example with a normal web browser) is able to download the subscribers. The security token should therefore be closely guarded and not be given out to unauthorized persons. Because of this, the screen does not display the token directly (so no one can simply look over your shoulder and "steal" the token). To display the token, you first have to click on the Show Download Security Token link.

  Creating a new Download Security Token: If you suspect that an unauthorized person has gained access to the download security token, you can use the Create New Download Security Token link to invalidate the previously used token and to create a new one.

• Individual Email Limit: Define if there shall be a limit for each subscriber of how many individual emails shall be sent to that subscriber. If this option is enabled, then you also need to fill out the values for the "No more than [ X ] emails over [ Y ] days" edit fields.

  The limit works as follows: If a mail job is targeted to the subscribers of this group (either via a direct mailing to the group, or via a mailing to one of the subscriber lists in the group), then subscribers that already received X emails during the last Y days will not receive this message, even if they otherwise fulfill all conditions for a recipient of the mail job.

• Data Encoding: The encoding used to store the profile values of the subscribers. This encoding is also inherited by all lists in the group, meaning that it also determines the encoding used to store the profile values of all list subscribers in all lists of the group. Select an encoding that matches the language that is going to be used when the profile fields are being filled out.

  Note: The encoding can no longer be changed once there is at least one subscriber or one list in the group. It can only be changed while the group is still empty (i.e. neither contains lists nor subscribers).

External Triggers

LISTSERV Maestro offers several actions that can be triggered remotely from an external source by simply accessing a special external trigger URL, via the HTTP protocol. This trigger URL can be accessed without the need to first login to Maestro.

With this, several scenarios are possible:

• If there are actions that need to be triggered manually by a user who does not want to login to Maestro first; then, the user could create bookmarks in his browser, where each bookmark contains a trigger URL and stands for an action that can be triggered. Or, perhaps a custom-made HTML page could be created with links that point to the trigger URLs.

• In a different scenario, these actions could be triggered by another process, such as a script or program. To trigger an action, all this other process has to do is to open a HTTP communication to the action's trigger URL. This type of external process could, for example, trigger an action according to a certain time schedule or each time a certain outside event happens.

To secure the external trigger URLs against unauthorized access, a security token needs to be included in each URL. Each action that can be triggered externally has a unique security token. Therefore, the security token in the URL serves two purposes: It identifies the action that is to be triggered, and it validates that the user or process that makes this request is indeed authorized to do so.

The security token for the action in question can be obtained from inside of the Maestro user interface. The exact location where the token can be obtained depends on the action that it stands for. Please see the description of the action in question for this information.

Important: You should make sure that this security token is not given out to unauthorized persons because anyone who knows the security token of a certain action is able to trigger this action, as long as he also has HTTP access to the Maestro server. If you suspect that an unauthorized person has gained access to the token, then you can create a new token (and invalidate the existing token) by clicking the appropriate link at the location where you obtained the token.

A trigger URL always has the following form:

http://SERVER_NAME/lui/externalAction.do?token=SECURITY_TOKEN

• where SERVER_NAME is replaced with the name of your Maestro server. (If a non-standard HTTP port is used, also include the port, separated with a colon ":". If access to your Maestro is protected with HTTPS, you need to specify "https://" instead of "http://".)

• where SECURITY_TOKEN is replaced with the security token for the action that the URL shall trigger.

External triggers come in two variants:

• Simple URL Access: The action is triggered by accessing the external trigger URL with a HTTP GET request.

  By accessing this URL, a HTTP GET request is made to Maestro. The server then first verifies the given security token and, if it is valid, triggers the corresponding action. The result of the action is returned in the form of a HTTP response.

  If everything went well, a response with the status code "200 - OK" is returned. In this case, the response body contains the result of the action. Most actions return a simple "OK" text in the result, but some actions may also return more data in the result; for example, if the purpose of the action was to download certain data from Maestro.

  If there was a problem executing the action, a response with a different status code is returned, such as "404 - Not Found" if an invalid security token was specified.

• URL Access with Additional Data: The action is triggered by accessing the external trigger URL with a HTTP POST request.

  In contrast to the "simple URL access" of above, the trigger URL must be accessed with a HTTP POST request, and the additional data that is necessary for the action must be included as part of the request body. The data that is required depends on the action in question. Please see the description of the action for this information.

  The result of the action is returned in form of a HTTP response, just like for the "simple URL access". Please see above for details.