These services are intended to provide efficient and effective means of communication of various kinds in the College. The Official Notices lists are for College administrative offices and Student officers to distribute brief, official notices to their constituent groups. The General Announcements lists will enable any member of a list to post a brief announcement to it.

Procedures and Guidelines for Using Official Notices E-Mail Lists

1. This service should be used as an alternative to paper notice distribution.

2. Individuals may not unsubscribe from these official notices lists. Students, faculty, and staff are urged to regularly check their e-mail for notices sent using these lists.

3. This service is to be used only for high priority official notices that require distribution to all members of a particular constituent group. Policy statements, security alerts, deadline information, serious service disruption, and other notices of clear concern to each person on the list is properly sent using this method.

4. This service should not be used as the sole method for distributing emergency information. While a few recipients may read the message soon after it is sent, it can be expected to take a day or two for even the majority of recipients to have read it. If the notice will have little value if read more than a few hours after sending, it is probably not worth using this communication method.

5. Notices of specific special events or other topics of great interest to only a minority of the members of a list should be sent instead to the General Announcements list described below.

6. Below are the lists currently available, where appropriate, to administrative departments and designated student officers. Requests for additional official lists can be submitted to Ray Phillips, Director of ITS. Special purpose lists not shared between departments will be facilitated using other e-mail methods.

7. The following individuals have authority over who will be given permission to send to each list:

• Dean of Students and Registrar - all official-notice student lists
• Dean of Faculty - all official-notice faculty lists
• Administrative V. P. - all official-notice employee lists

These individuals may prefer that requests for particular mailings be sent to them for review and, if approved, forwarded directly to the list on behalf of the originating department.

8. Each official notice list, which is used for official mailings to a particular group, will have an associated copy list that includes individuals outside that group. For example, this will ensure that if an authorized person in Security sends e-mail to a student list, individuals in the Dean of Students' office will receive a copy of that e-mail. Membership on the copy list is also determined by the individual with authority over the list.

9. E-mail sent to one of these lists must originate from (i.e., have the return address of) the sender's own College account but may refer to the content as coming from another person by using such language in the body of the message or subject line as "Message forwarded from…" or "Message sent on behalf of …"

10. Here is the procedure that an individual having appropriate authorization will use to send mail to an official e-mail list using any of the available e-mail applications (e.g., Eudora, Pine, etc.):

• Enter the official e-mail list name in the "To:" field.
• The subject line must be used to indicate the originating department and general topic of the e-mail (e.g., "SGA DEADLINE:" or "DEAN OF STUDENTS POLICY NOTICE:") followed by enough information to identify the nature of the contents.
• The body of the e-mail message should be simple text only and as short as possible. Remember that fancy formatting that looks good in your e-mail system will probably look really bad in a different system used by recipients. Avoid indented paragraphs and don't try to line up columns of text or numbers. Fonts differ, making spacing in different e-mail readers inconsistent, resulting in appearance inconsistent with what you intend.
• There should be no attached documents. If it is desired to make Word, Excel, or other documents available to recipients, these should be placed on the Web, the General Server or other location, with appropriate links or instructions within the body of the e-mail to facilitate access.

11. In a few weeks it is expected that anyone sending e-mail to one of these lists will have to do so using a web page now under development, rather than a conventional e-mail application. Additional information will be distributed later.

12. ITS will periodically regenerate list memberships to keep them current. If you have questions about criteria for list membership, consult Cathy Langlais, Director of Administrative ITS.

Procedures and Guidelines for Using General Announcements E-Mail Lists

1. This service is still under development and will be announced later in the Spring semester.
2. Lists such as "general-announcements-students", "general-announcements-classof00" and "general-announcements-faculty" will be open for posting by each member of the group.
3. This is where event announcements (colloquium talks, receptions, concerts, FYI, etc.) can be distributed in a once-a-day bundle (a digest) delivered to each person on the list.
4. Any person may unsubscribe from a general announcements list of which they are a member, but then they will not be able to post to that list.
5. Each list will periodically, perhaps at the beginning of the fall semester, be reset to full membership, requiring those who so desire to unsubscribe again.
6. These are not intended to be discussion lists, so replying to the list in response to a posting will be discouraged.
7. The same guidelines described above on use of the subject line for conveying information about the message and the value of brevity of content will apply here as well.