A moderated community is a closed list with two classes of member. A core group - your team, staff, or trusted participants - has full access including direct messaging. An outer group - customers, research participants, or invited contributors - can send and receive through the list but their messages are held for admin review before delivery, and they cannot initiate direct messages.
This configuration suits businesses running focus groups, customer advisory panels, moderated feedback communities, or any situation where you want structured dialog with outside participants while maintaining control over what reaches your full group.
1. EMail Parrot Configuration
Create your list. Go to emparrot.com/admin and create a new list. Choose a list name that reflects the community’s purpose.
Add your core members first. These are the people with full access - your staff or trusted participants. Add them with pseudonyms, admin flag as appropriate, and no moderation required.
Add external participants with moderation enabled. For each participant who should be moderated, set the Moderate flag to True. Their messages will be held in the quarantine queue for admin review before delivery to the group.
Disable direct messaging. In Group Settings, set “Disable Direct User-to-User Emails” to True. This prevents participants from contacting core members privately. All communication goes through the list.
Leave VPE disabled. This is a closed list - outside parties cannot initiate contact. Your core members initiate contact with participants by emailing them directly (from personal email, outside EMail Parrot) and instructing them to reply to the list address.
Consider a core-members-only sublist. Create a restricted sublist (prefix with ^) containing only your core team. Use this for internal discussions about the community that participants should not see.
Recommended settings:
- VPE: off (default)
- Direct messaging: disabled
- Moderation: enabled for all participant-class members
- Restricted sublist for internal discussion:
^teamor similar - Advanced protection: on
2. Your Email Client Setup
Quarantine monitoring. Admin members should ensure quarantine notification emails from EMail Parrot are not filtered to spam. These notifications arrive when a moderated participant’s message is waiting for review. Check the quarantine tab in the dashboard regularly, or set up an email filter to flag quarantine notifications as high priority.
Optional - dedicated review folder. Create a filter that routes quarantine notification emails from the admin sublist address (admin.yourlist@emparrot.com) to a dedicated folder so reviews do not get lost in a busy inbox.
3. Addressing Conventions
Core members use the standard list address to reach everyone: yourlistname@emparrot.com
Participants are told to email yourlistname@emparrot.com to reach the group. Their messages are held for review. On release, the message is delivered to all members with their pseudonym as the sender.
Direct messaging is disabled. Core members wanting to contact a specific participant privately must do so outside EMail Parrot using their real address (which only admins can see in the dashboard).
Internal channel: Core members use the restricted sublist for internal discussions: ^team.yourlistname@emparrot.com (or whatever you named it). Only core team members can send to or receive from this address.
Settings to Consider
The settings described above are the minimum for a working moderated community. A few additional options:
Advanced protection screens for sophisticated spoofing and social-engineering patterns. With external participants in your community, you have less control over who is actually sending through those accounts. Advanced protection catches impersonation attempts and reduces delivery of phishing-style content that might slip past standard filtering.
AI safe protection blocks prompt-injection attempts embedded in email content. Research and advisory communities increasingly have participants and staff using AI tools to draft and summarize messages. Enabling this prevents a participant from crafting a message intended to manipulate an AI assistant reading on behalf of a core member.
Quarantine expiry. If your moderation workload is high, review the quarantine retention setting in the dashboard. Messages waiting for admin review that are not acted on within the retention window are automatically discarded. Set a reminder or a daily review time so participant messages do not time out unread.
Restricted sublist naming. Consider naming your internal restricted sublist something non-obvious to participants. While restricted sublists cannot be sent to from outside, their existence and name are visible in the address book response. ^staff or ^core is fine for most purposes; if the existence of an internal channel is itself sensitive, use a less descriptive name.
Checklist
- List created at emparrot.com
- Core members added, no moderation
- Participants added with Moderate flag set to True
- Direct messaging disabled in Group Settings
- Internal restricted sublist created for team discussion
- Participants given the list address and told messages are reviewed before posting
- Admin email client set to surface quarantine notifications
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