Learn
This page is a quick guide to some features of Pigeon that require more explanation.
Applications
Freezing
Invoices
Members
Memberships
Pony Mail
Plans
Settings
Sites
Submissions
Tasks
Usage
Applications
An application represents an attempt by somebody to subscribe to one of your mailing lists. This can only happen when an email is sent by the person who wants to subscribe to the special yourlist-subscribe@yoursite.pigeon.mx email address associated with your mailing list. The content of the email is ignored, and can be empty or say anything.
Unfortunately, because email was not designed with an adversarial environment in mind, anybody in the world can send an email pretending to be somebody else. This practice is called spoofing. If somebody called Bob sends a subscription application to one of your mailing lists but pretends to be Alice, then Alice will be subscribed and will start to receive unwanted email.
Because of this, when an subscription application message is received Pigeon automatically sends a response to the person who claims to have sent the application asking them to follow a link to confirm that they really own that email. This approach is called C/R spam filtering. If the sender successfully confirms that they sent the application, any moderator of the list, of which there may be several, manually approve or disapprove subscription requests. In pigeon, the combination of C/R and manual moderation is called "challenge then moderate". We do not allow applications to be automatically approved, in order to decrease spam.
Pigeon performs some spam filtering on the special email address used to receive subscription applications, but this spam filter is not particularly aggressive in order to avoid the risk of false positives. Therefore it can happen that a mailing list subscription application address can fall into the hands of spammers. This is another reason why we always require challenges in addition to manual moderation.
In addition to "challenge then moderate", subscription applications can also be set to "refuse". This mode automatically rejects all new subscription applications and can be useful for archived lists, or for lists whose membership is a known static enumeration.
We may remove unmoderated applications after 30 days.
DinoSource
DinoSource ApS is the Danish company who built Pigeon. We specialise in open source, and so we like to use open, distributed, well-proven technologies. We use email for group communication, and we created and helped to create various tools to facilitate using email in this way. We brought many of these technologies together, and added new bespoke components, in order to create Pigeon.
We also provide many other services, which you can read about on our homepage.
Freezing
Mailing lists at Pigeon can be frozen, which primarily means that they will no longer receive new messages. Their membership list is frozen, and settings cannot be changed. Lists can be unfrozen at any time, but any messages that were received and rejected in the interim will have been lost.
Freezing a mailing list may be useful in several scenarios. They can be used to host historic mailing list archives where the lists are no longer active. They can be used to ensure that other lists have higher priority for receiving email if storage quotas are being reached. And they can be useful in an emergency if a list is receiving unwanted messages from a large number of subscribers or having a similar issue as a kind of quick blanket moderation.
When a list is frozen, we reject email for it at the SMTP level. This means that we do not keep a record of the contents of email that is rejected. Therefore, the frozen status must be used with caution.
Invoices
When you sign up for Pigeon, we give you a free trial lasting for one month. When the free trial ends, or if you want to raise your usage limits, it is necessary to purchase a paid plan. We offer several tiers of paid plan, and they are purchased on a one month rolling basis. Payment for a month must take place before we provision services for that month.
Our payment processor, Stripe Inc., automatically sends out an invoice when payment is required. We record these invoices and keep them on file, for you to peruse. Sometimes we are able to collect the payment automatically if your credit card company allows this. When automatic payment fails, we send out an email and also remind you in prominent warning messages when you sign into the Pigeon website.
Members
Each mailing list at Pigeon has members associated with it: these are people who have applied to subscribe to the mailing list and have been accepted. Members are not, however, necessarily subscribed in the sense of being able to send and receive email from the list. Each individual member of a mailing list has permissions associated with their membership which lets Pigeon know how mail to and from them should be treated.
Memberships
When you are a member of a mailing list hosted at Pigeon, your membership details are listed on your memberships page. If you are a moderator of that list, then a link to manage your membership settings will also be displayed.
Permissions
The permission options for receiving email from a list are simple: the member either Receives no mail or Receives mail. It may seem contradictory to have a member of a mailing list who does not receive email, but it can be useful for a number of reasons. For example, some people may prefer to read the mailing list archives online only. Or the list may be an announcement list or newsletter where the owner, the person who sends out the emails, does not want to receive a copy of their own emails.
The permission options for sending email to a list are more complicated. The options are Cannot send mail, Can send mail, censored, Can send mail, and Can send mail and moderate. Cannot send mail means that the user's messages are not posted to the list. Can send mail, censored means that when a user posts a message to the list it is quarantined and a notification is sent to list moderators so that they can manually review the message before accepting or blocking it. Can send mail means that a user's messages are posted to the list immediately. Can send mail and moderate means that the user is considered a moderator, and they can moderate subscription applications and quarantined messages.
Pony Mail
Apache Pony Mail is an open source mailing list archive suite. It handles the storage of messages in a database, and the user interface for browsing those messages online. It can also handle permissions, so that some mailing lists can only be browsed by authenticated users.
Because Apache Pony Mail is open source, anybody can download, install, and use it. But because installing and maintaining software always has an associated maintenance cost, we offer Pigeon as a paid solution for mailing list archive hosting. In addition, Apache Pony Mail only solves the mailing list archive component of hosting a mailing list. It does not solve management of the list itself. We use our own custom software at pigeon for mailing list management.
Plans
Pigeon is a paid service for mailing list hosting. We offer a range of plans that come with different service levels and corresponding different prices.
|
| Small
| Medium
| Large
| 
|
| Storage | 200 MB
| 1,000 MB
| 3 GB
| 20 GB
|
| Members | 200
| 1,000
| 3,000
| 20,000
|
| Lists | 1
| 5
| 10
| 50
|
| Sites | 1
| 2
| 5
| 10
|
| Private Lists | No
| Yes
| Yes
| Yes
|
Monthly
Cost | €4.99
or
$4.99
| €9.99
or
$9.99
| €19.99
or
$19.99
| €49.99
or
$49.99
|
We also provide custom plans, for which please contact us directly.
Once you select a plan, you pay for one month of service in advance. This is a recurring charge, so you will continue to be on that plan until you cancel it. The charge will be invoiced to you when due, and our payment processor, Stripe Inc., will attempt to collect the due total automatically. Due to credit card regulation changes, it is becoming increasingly difficult in some regions to automatically collect due payments, and so you may need to confirm the payment. We will send out an email to remind you, and also remind you prominently in the user interace on the Pigeon website.
In the first four weeks of your Pigeon account, if you have not selected a paid plan then you will be on a taster plan, which gives you a small service level for free so that you can try out Pigeon and figure out whether you like it.
You can switch currency at any point by cancelling your plan first and then going to the plan purchase page and following the link to purchase in a different currency. You can also switch plans at any point by just purchasing a new plan. Your old plan will be automatically cancelled if you do this.
Settings
Maximum permitted email size - Pigeon does not allow messages over 25 MiB (26214400 bytes), as an absolute upper limit, but mailing list managers can decide on an even smaller limit than this using this setting. If a bare number is used then it indicates bytes, and "KiB" and "MiB" suffixes scale the number by 1024 and 1048576 respectively.
Notify moderators via email of outstanding tasks - Moderators must manually moderate mailing list subscription applications and quarantined messages. There will be a notification on the website in such a case, but if this setting is turned on then an email will be sent out to all moderators immediately whenever there is a new moderation task. The email can be replied to in order to perform the relevant moderation action.
Convert all HTML emails automatically to plain text - If this setting is on, the first text/html payload in a multipart message is converted to text using html2text and marked as text/plain. Messages are modified before being posted to mailing list archives and sent out to the relevant mailing list members. Please be aware modifying a message in this way may potentially break DKIM, DMARC, and related techologies.
Prefix to add to all email subjects, or empty for none - It is a longstanding practice to add a prefix to subjects in mailing list software, to make the provenance of list messages more obvious to recipients. This practice is falling out of fashion due to the rise of message integrity technologies such as DKIM and DMARC, but we still support it in Pigeon. The text in this field will be prepended to the subject with a SPACE character in the middle, i.e. new_subject = prefix.strip(" ") + " " + old_subject. Please be aware modifying a message in this way may potentially break DKIM, DMARC, and related techologies.
Sign all emails with Pigeon DKIM and origin - The Pigeon mailing list software adds headers to a message, but tries not to break DKIM (and therefore DMARC). Most messages in the wild, however, still do not have DMARC set up. If this setting is set, we rewrite the display From (RFC5322.From) header so that the message comes from the Pigeon domain, and move the original display From to a Sender header. We can then sign the message with our own key. This is called approach 3A in the DMARC FAQ.
Action to take for new subscription applications - This setting controls whether subscription applications should be allowed, in which case the challenge then moderate setting should be selected, or automatically rejected, in which case the refuse setting should be selected.
Visibility of the mailing list web archives - The mailing list web archives are visible to anybody in the world if this setting is public, and are limited to list members if this setting is private. In the case of a private list, members are only able to view list messages online in the archives when they sign in and authenticate themselves. In order to do this, they need to have a free Pigeon account. They do not need so sign up for a paid plan.
Sites
Sites are the Pigeon subdomains where your mailing list archives can be found on the web. These subdomains also form the part after the @ in the email addresses for mailing lists. Once a site is claimed by a user, we do not allow that site to be "unclaimed", even if no mailing lists have been created using that site or all of the site's mailing lists have been deleted. Therefore it is important to make sure that you really want to claim a site before doing so, and to check the name carefully.
Submissions
A submission represents an attempt by somebody to send a message to one of your mailing lists when their membership permissions on that list are set to Censor. This means that a moderator of that mailing list must explicitly approve or reject the message. The message content can be viewed before making a decision, but the content cannot be altered.
We may remove unmoderated submissions after 30 days.
Tasks
The two main administative tasks associated with mailing lists are managing user applications to become a member of the list, and managing quarantined messages from users whose membership permissions are marked as "Censor". When tasks become available, a warning is displayed at the top of your lists mangement page. If applicable, an email will also be sent to all moderators of the relevant lists notifying them of the task. Tasks can be completed on the website, or by replying to the task email.
Usage
The greater the purchase price of the Pigeon plan that you select, the larger the resources that come with it. There are four kinds of resource that have corresponding plan quotas: storage, members, lists, and sites.
Storage refers to the overall number of bytes of all of the emails in your mailing list web archives. For example, if you only have one mailing list and three emails were sent to it, each exactly 1024 bytes long, but one of them was quarantined and rejected by a moderator or later deleted, then you will have used 2048 bytes of storage. A common statistic reported on the web for the size of an average email is 75 KB, which means that 1 GiB of space would be sufficient to store about 13,900 messages. Individual messages can also be deleted if storage space becomes tight.
Members refers to how many people are subscribed to a mailing list. Technically, if they appear in the members list then they are a member, which means that permissions are irrelevant and even a member who does not receive messages from a list and cannot send to the list is still counted as a member. If a person is subscribed to more than one mailing list of a user, then they are counted for each membership to each list.
Lists refers to how many mailing lists a user may have. There may be an extra restriction, depending on the plan, about whether private lists are permitted. Once created, a list may be deleted, but this will delete everything associated with the list including all of its archived messages.
Sites refers to how many Pigeon subdomains a user may have. Unlike the other three resource types, once a site is claimed it cannot be unclaimed. Therefore this resource cannot be recovered, and the only way to create additional capacity would be to purchase a larger plan.