MAINTAINING IT CENTER EMAIL LISTS

The IT Center maintains electronic mailing lists for each of the departments in the College of Medicine. These lists were created to facilitate communication among the faculty and staff members in each department, and are divided into separate faculty and staff listings. They are further divided into separate lists for Gainesville departmental faculty and staff, and Jacksonville departmental faculty and staff. These lists are hosted by CIRCA (the Center for Instructional Research and Computing Activities).

To maintain these lists, and keep them current, a series of commands can be utilized to add, remove, and change addresses within a list. There are also commands to look at the membership of each list and to search for a particular address within a list, or within several lists - if you do not know which list someone is subscribed to.

To request creation of a mailing list from (hosted by NERDC), go to: http://lists.ufl.edu and click on the link "Request creation of a new mailing list".

"Lists" - This command returns a listing of all the email lists hosted by a particular server (in this case, the CIRCA list server). To send the 'list' command, send an email message to: 'listserv@lists.ufl.edu' and make sure to leave the 'subject' line blank. In the body of the message, type the word 'lists'. Make sure that the automatic signature option is not activated when you do this. (The automatic signature is usually your name or address information automatically inserted at the bottom of each email message you send out.)

"Review" - The review command shows the membership of a list (i.e., the people who are subscribed to that list). To review the members of a particular list, send a message (via email) to: listserv@lists.ufl.edu. Make sure to leave the 'subject' line blank and that no automated signatures (i.e. names/addresses automatically inserted at the bottom of your email messages) are activated. In the body of the message, type the word 'review' and the name of the list you want to review, then send the message. After a short time, you will receive an email message containing the list of subscribers to that list. As an example, a review command should look like this: 'review listname-l' (insert the name of the list where I have typed listname-l - all of the lists will end with a hyphen 'l' (-l))

"Add" - The add command adds a subscriber to a list. You can add several subscribers at a time to a list, using this command. To add one or more subscribers, send an email message to: 'listserv@lists.ufl.edu' and make sure to leave the 'subject' line blank. In the body of the message, type: 'quiet add listname-l address name'

(For example: quiet add deanstaff-l twebb@dean.med.ufl.edu Webb, Tonya)

*NOTE - You can send multiple 'add' commands to add several people to a list, provided that you are adding all of them to the same list and that you don't use any other commands (e.g., review, delete) in the same message.

"Delete" - The delete command will remove a subscriber or subscribers from a list. As with the 'add' command, you can delete several people at a time from a list, provided that they are all on the same list and that you don't use any other commands in the email message. To delete one or more subscribers from a list, send an email message to: 'listserv@lists.ufl.edu' and leave the 'subject' line blank. In the body of the message type: 'quiet delete listname-l address' and make sure that any automated signatures are not activated, in your email message.

(For example: quiet delete deanstaff-l twebb@dean.med.ufl.edu)

1. To make a change to an address in a list, you will need to delete that address from a list and add the new one. So this will be two commands - an 'add' and a 'delete'. This would happen in the instance where a woman gets married and has a name change, or where someone obtains a different email address due to changes in their department's email system.
2. As mentioned earlier, the departmental lists are separated into faculty, housestaff and staff listings, and further broken down into Gainesville and Jacksonville faculty and staff. The lists can be differentiated by either a 'g' or 'j' at the end of a list name. For instance, 'anesfacg-l' means anesthesiology faculty in Gainesville, while 'anesfacj-l' designates anesthesiology faculty in Jacksonville. Please note that some departments are not represented in Jacksonville, so their lists will not have the 'g' or 'j' at the end. Any list that doesn't have the 'g' or 'j' designation at the end will contain only Gainesville people.
3. All of the lists will have the '-l' attached to the end of the list name.
4. Do not mix commands in a single email message. For example, you cannot do an 'add' and a 'delete' command in the same message. The commands must be consistent within the message. You may, however, do several 'adds' at once, within one email message, provided that all of the email addresses are being subscribed to the same list.
5. As owner/moderator of these lists, you will be responsible for approving new subscribers and adding them to the lists, and taking invalid addresses off the list. You will receive error notifications in your email folder to notify you when a particular address is failing. This is usually due to the fact that the subscriber has left employment in that department and their email account is no longer active. The error messages will indicate, in the subject line, which list the error came from. You will need to contact the computing coordinator for that department (the department will be indicated by the list error message) and ask them about the status of the address which is failing. After you know the status of the failing address, you will know what to do with it (usually delete it or change it).
6. If you need to add or remove an owner of a list, send your request to LISTMASTER@LISTS.UFL.EDU. State who should be added or removed from the particular list.
7. Another source of errors is lack of a Gatorlink mailbox, particularly on the resident email lists. When residents come into the College of Medicine to begin their residency, they are given a Gatorlink account, which they can use to download email and use the World Wide Web. If their Gatorlink account was set up without a mailbox and dial-up quota, they will not receive mail from the lists to which they are subscribed (usually under a Gatorlink address). In this case, you will need to contact the UF Computing Help Desk (392-HELP or 392-4357) and get the user's mailbox and dial-up quota installed. Just give them the information they need (usually the user name, which appears before the '@' sign in their address), and they should be able to help you. Most often, the errors generated from the housestaff (resident) email lists will result from this.

After working with these lists, things will become a little easier and clearer in terms of maintaining these lists. The most effective way to keep these lists current is to keep the errors down as much as possible. The quicker error messages are resolved, the fewer error messages you'll get. Maintaining close contact with the departmental computing coordinators is also essential to keeping these lists current, especially when adding new employees to these lists. The computer coordinators can provide the email addresses of new employees who need to be subscribed to a list.

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