Electronic Mailing Lists for Faculty & Staff

University Technology offers electronic mailing lists to faculty and staff members who wish to conduct discussions by email. The message author sends their message to one address, rather than many addresses. If you would like to learn more about majordomo, our mailing list software, and the frequently used commands information is available below.

• Requests
• List Options
• Majordomo
• Using Mailing Lists

Requests

Current faculty and staff can request an electronic mailing list by completing the online request form. Normal turn-around time is five business days. Account information will be sent via email.

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List Options

List Types

Distribution Only: This is a one-way list. The list owner is the only person who can send messages. List members cannot communicate with other list members.

Moderated: This is a two-way list with a moderator. All messages, including reply messages, are sent first to the faculty list owner. The faculty list owner must approve the messages before they are sent to all list members. (Note: There can be a lot of work in moderating a list, especially one with a lot of mail traffic.)

Un-moderated: The most common type of list. All members of this list can send a new message or reply to an existing message. Messages will be sent to all members of the list.

Subscription Policies

Closed: With a closed list anyone can send a message asking to be added to the list. These requests are then forwarded to the list owner, who needs to approve the subscription. For most academic purposes a closed subscription list is best.

Open: Anyone can join a list with an open subscription policy. There is no approval step; the requestor is automatically added to the list membership.

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Majordomo

Majordomo is an electronic mailing list program, which University Technology uses to manage email lists. Faculty list owners, as well as list participants, send commands to majordomo via email to handle list membership and other list maintenance tasks. Faculty who plan to use electronic mailing lists should be familiar with the following frequently-used commands. You can use these commands by sending an email message to list_name@lesley.edu with the command in the message body. The subject line should be blank and signatures should be removed from the body of the email.

• subscribe list_name
  Subscribe yourself to the named list_name.
• unsubscribe list_name
  Unsubscribe yourself from the named list_name.
• who list_name
  Find out who is on the named list_name.
• info list_name
  Retrieve the general introductory information for the named list_name.
• help
  Get a message showing all majordomo list commands and their options.

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