Mailinglists at ITU

What is mailinglists?

Mailinglists are a way to share information among several persons. A mailinglist has an email-adress, which is 'expanded' to a group of email-adresses, when a mail is send to the adress. If Larry, Curly and Moe for example subscribe to the mailinglists truegeeks@itu.dk, they will all receive mails send to this adress.

The advantage of mailinglists is, that subscribers receive the mails as soon as they are send and that these mails end up in the subscribers mailboxes. But this is also the disadvantage of mailinglist as there is a risk of being 'drowned' in uninteresting mails.

This means as well that a certain discipline is required; one should only send a mail to a mailinglist if it is perceived as being of interest to all the recepients. If the subject is not perceived as so, a newsgroup might be a better alternative for sharing the information.

Automatically generated and "private" mailinglists at ITU

A part of the mailinglists at ITU are automatically generated, among other thing on the basis of employee and student-directories. An example is the "alle_stud@itu.dk"-list which all students at ITU automatically subscribe to.

It is also possible to get a "private" mailinglist for a group of users at ITU. If one has a relevant purpose (of study), one can contact the System administration. Sysadm will then create the mailinglist and afterwards it's up to the owner of the mailinglist (see below) to administrate it. Please Note: Henceforth a mailing list name has to contain a dash or an underscore, for example geek-list or true_geeks. This rule has been introduced to make it easier to distinguish mailing lists from user names.

Click here to to see a list of all the existing mailinglists at ITU

A short user guide to mailinglists

It is extremely simple to send a mail to a mailinglist; you just do as you would when sending a mail to anyother person. Just write the name of the mailinglist as the recepient (eg. truegeeks@itu.dk). Then all the subscribers to the "truegeeks@itu.dk"-list receives the mail. If you subscribe to the mailinglist yourself, you will naturally receive the mails that other people send to the list.(You will also receive the mails you send yourself, unless you disable this feature)

If you want to subscribe to one of the mailinglists that aren't automatically generated, you can use the webinterface at the URL: http://mail.itu.dk. Choose the mailinglist that you want to subscribe to, and fill out the form with your mailadress and password. You'll then receive a mail to which you'll need to reply before you're registered as an active member of the mailinglist.

As a subscriber you have the option of changing your settingsfor the mailinglist. This is done via the abovementioned webinterface. To change the settings, choose the mailinglist and enter your emailadress at the bottom of the screen. You'll then have the options of changing the password or enable the 'Digest Mode'. This is also where you unsubscribe to a mailinglist if you no longer want to receive mails from a mailinglist.

A more throrough introduction for subscribers to mailinglists is available here

A short administration guide to mailinglists

Every mailinglist has as mentioned before, an owner. The owner has the option of changing a number of settings for the mailinglist; among other things he/she can add or remove subscribers, make sure that only subscribers can write to the list, limit the size of mails accepted at yhe mailinglist etc. The owner is, in other words, god of the mailinglist.

To change the administratorsettings, one uses the webinterface at http://mail.itu.dk and chooses 'mailing list management'. The owner then chooses the mailing list, enters the password and clicks the 'let me in'-button. The settings are divided into different categories, eg. 'General Options' and 'Membership Management'. The options are mostly selfevident, but there are a short help-file for each option( choose the 'details'-link)

A short introduction to the administrator-interface is available here, and a more thorough introduction here.

Remember to log out when you're finished!

Please note that it is the owner, and not Sysadm, which are responsible for administering the mailinglist.