Tour

This page tells you what you can expect when you sign up to Pigeon.

Create
Lists
Members
Account
Archives
Other

Create

To create an account, use the "create account" form on the front page.

You will be sent a verification message to your email address. Follow the link in the verification message and you will be asked to confirm your password and choose your Pigeon site name.

Once you choose a site name, you will be signed in to your account.

Lists

Once you've created your account, you'll be presented with a page showing all of your lists. You won't have any lists yet, so the first thing you'll probably want to do is create one.

To create a list, use the list creation form on your lists page.

Once you've created a list, it will show in the table of lists.

If you follow the "set up this list" link, or the list email address in the table of lists, you'll be taken to the setup page for that specific mailing list.

Here, the main thing you can do is configure the list settings. You can also do a few other things like sending to the list, deleting a message, and so on, but when you've just created a list you should first check that all of the settings are as you want them to be.

A list isn't very useful without any people subscribed to it, so you'll probably want to add some members.

Members

You cannot subscribe a member yourself. This is to prevent people from using mailing lists as a spam mechanism. Others can subscribe to your list by sending an email with any subject and any body to a special subscription address. You can find that special address on the members page, which can be accessed by following the "Members" link at the top of your list's setup page.

On the members page, the subscription address will be in the "Add a member" section.

When somebody sends an email to this address, Pigeon will automatically respond with an email like this:

Somebody, hopefully you, just sent a subscription request to the
following mailing list:

discuss@saura.pigeon.mx

If this was you, please confirm by sending an email to:

vppktib356dt6cqaqqg3fxnqnte4b7klrztuvas3lgnrvemrb@bot.pigeon.mx

In most cases, just replying to this email should work correctly.

If you did not apply to subscribe to this mailing list, please
ignore this email.

Once the recipient follows the instructions and confirms by sending an email to the long address, the application to join the mailing list will be available to review on the website. There will be a link to the applications review page on the list's members page, and also on the setup page, when there are applications to review.

The application review page itself will contain applications from all lists that have applications. This allows you to review all list applications in one page.

There is one form per mailing list. If there are five or more applications overall, then there will also be a form which lets you moderate all applications simultaneously. This can be useful in the common workflow where only a few or potentially no subscription applications are being rejected, and the remainder approved.

Once an application is approved, the member will show up on the mailing list's members page.

There are two columns next to each member: a "Receive" column and a "Send" column. The receive column must be checked in order for that member to receive messages sent to the mailing list. The send column has the options "Block", "Censor", "Accept", and "Obey" for each member. "Block" means that they can't send email to the list; "Censor" means that all of their messages must be reviewed by a moderator; "Accept" means that their messages are accepted without moderation; and "Obey" means that the member is a special user who can moderate tasks via email and, if they have a Pigeon account, via the website.

When a member subscribes, their permissions should be set accordingly. Since there may be many members subscribed to a mailing list, the members page allows filtering a subset by name or by permissions. It also allows members to be removed entirely from that list.

Account

After you've set up a list, you should inspect your account settings.

Here you can check your usage, change your plan, change your password, set an external site to sign in, or review your invoices.

In general, the two most important items to review are usage and invoices, as these affect provisioning of your services. If you are nearing your usage limits, you may want to increase your plan or delete some of your resources. We try to collect invoices automatically, but due to secure finance regulations in some jurisdictions we may not be able to do that. In that case we will send an email, and also notify you when you sign in to the Pigeon website.

Other

There are several other things that can be done at Pigeon. You can open a support ticket if you encounter problems, download all of your data, redact your data, review site policies, or delete your whole account. All of these things can be done on a service page.