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Computing  Mailing Lists

This page explains how to send a message to the various email lists used for Department-wide circulars. Note that only particular sender addresses are allowed to send notices. Any sender who is not on the approved list who tries to send to one of these lists will get a bounce message suggesting that they contact Admin to have their message circulated.

If you need to send a message to specific classes of person across all buildings, there are six seperate lists:

• group-leaders@dpag.ox.ac.uk
• associate-group-leaders@dpag.ox.ac.uk
• postgraduates@dpag.ox.ac.uk
• graduate-students@dpag.ac.ac.uk
• support-staff@dpag.ox.ac.uk
• visitors@dpag.ox.ac.uk

Hopefully the list names are pretty self-explanatory. The only one that has potential for confusion is, I think, "postgraduates" - this is intended for researchers who have got a graduate degree but are not group leaders.

Each of those lists also exists in a seperate "-lg" and an "-sh" version, standing for "Le Gros Clark" and "Sherrington" respectively. So to reach group leaders in the Sherrington building you would send a message to "group-leaders-sh@dpag.ox.ac.uk", or to reach visitors in LGC you would send to "visitors-lg@dpag.ox.ac.uk".

To reach everybody in all the buildings, use the address "department@dpag.ox.ac.uk".

Please:

Carefully consider who the appropriate audience for your message is (or indeed whether the message really needs to be circulated at all!), and if possible send it to a subset of the available lists rather than indiscriminately using "department@...". If people get annoyed by receiving too much email of no relevance to them then we run the risk that they will start to ignore or filter the traffic.

Try to be very sparing with the use of message attachments, if you use them at all. It is much more effective to include all the useful information in the plain text body of the email. Not everybody reads their email at a desktop Windows PC with a full suite of software applications - if the gist of your message is in an attached file then some of the recipients will not be able to read it, and some that could will not bother to open it. It is also worth keeping in mind that a message sent to the whole Department gets duplicated into hundreds and hundreds of separate copies, which are all individually delivered to the recipients' inboxes - if there are large files attached this causes a lot of load on the mail system and wastes large amounts of disk space on the mail servers that end up storing the delivered messages.