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Ezmlm is different from other mailing list managers in that it is list-centric rather than host-centric. With a list-centric interface, you address the list directly with administrative commands. With ezmlm, the command is embedded in the list address thus becoming part of it (i.e., the ‘command address’.) With smartlist, again you address the list, but send all administrative commands to the ‘list-request’ address. Ezmlm lists can support this if you use the ezmlm-make(1) -q switch to configure ezmlm-request(1) in DIR/manager.
Other mailing list managers are host-centric, i.e. administrative commands for any list on that particular host are addressed to a central address such as ‘majordomo@host’, ‘listserv@host’, or ‘listproc@host’. Then the user is required to place the command in either the subject header or more commonly in the body text of the message. The listname has to be included with the command. [Note: The above concept is not universally applicable to all host-centric mailing lists. While intended to to used in a host-centric manner, many such mailing list managers also support ‘listname-request@host’ addressing. See the applicable list manger documentation for details. Coverage of this aspect of other mailing list manager functionality is beyond the scope of this FAQ.] To make the migration to ezmlm easier, support for a host-centric style mailing list manger is available. This is based on the use of ezmlm-request(1) with the -f config_file switch.