What name should I choose for my mailing list?
Try to make it as descriptive as possible. We recommend that your list name should be 6 to 21 letters and/or numbers long. The only punctuation permitted is the hyphen (same as a minus sign): "-".
Where possible, please start your suggested list name with the initials of the relevant faculty or department, such as "MHS-", "FLS-" or "ITS-".
For example, the list for staff in IT Services is called "ITS-STAFF", the list for the Humanities eLearning Network is called "HUM-ELEARN-NET" and the list for the Ellen Wilkinson Building User Group is called "ELLENWILKINSON-UG".
Your list name should reflect the topic of the list in question.
What should my List Description be?
Please supply a one line description of the list, which can be up to 45 characters in length.
For example:
Manchester table tennis players
What is the difference between "List Description" and "Long List Description"?
The Long List Description can contain more detailed information regarding the purpose of the mailing list. Both descriptions must be provided, however, if you aren't sure what to put for the long description, just use a copy the short description.
This is the person who is responsible for administering the list. They will normally also receive any email messages that the list generates, which includes errors, subscription information, delete information and so on. The list owner must use a University of Manchester email address. List owners are subscribed to their own lists by default. Lists can have more than one owner.
The list owner decides who can subscribe to the list, who can send messages to the list, and can also delegate those decisions to other people.
There are three main types of lists:
- Public lists: Anyone with an email address (internal or external)can send to a public list. Typically the list members are just a few staff who deal with incoming emails e.g. from the public, potential students, staff. All members of the list can see all replies to the list.
- Private lists: Only people who are members of the list can send messages to it. This is most suitable for "discussion" type lists. Everyone on the list will receive the messages sent to the list by any other list member. These lists can become quite busy (sometimes called "high traffic"), especially if there are a lot of members.
- Moderated lists:Only the owner and moderators can send messages out to the list members. Emails can be sent from anyone to the list but the content should be checked by the moderator before deciding to forward it to others on the list. This should be used for all announcements to students.
- By Owner: Forces the owner to approve all new members.
- Open, Confirm: Similar to "By Owner" but sends an email to the new subscriber, with a link they need to click on to prove their identity.
- Closed: Automatically rejects the subscription without any intervention from the list owner, because the list owner must add each member.
Regardless of the subscription option selected, any member may unsubscribe at any time, and the owner will be notified when this action is taken.
Acknowledgement of messages sent and copy to self
Normally, there's not really any point in having either of these options set to "yes" because if there are any errors, the sender will get an error email sent back to them, and they will normally have a copy in their Sent Items folder. However, these options are available if you want them.
This option provides a default setting so that when someone clicks "reply", to respond to an email from the list, it will either reply to the whole list or just to the sender. However "reply-to sender" doesn.t prevent people from responding to the whole list - the list should be set up as a moderated list to prevent this happening.
If you would like your messages saving on the listserv server, please choose "yes". In most cases this isn't necessary, as people can save the messages in their own account, but the option is there for people that need it.