By Mike Quiner

WCTS maintains a collection of centralized email mailing lists to make it quicker and easier for you to communicate with the Whitman community as a whole. There are general discussion lists, and more specialized list dealing with topical items for your convenience.

The available lists are:

• students@whitman.edu - General discussion list for Students.
• community@whitman.edu - General discussion list for Faculty and Staff.
• rides@whitman.edu - A list for people needing and providing rides.
• forsale@whitman.edu - Selling and buying items.
• lostandfound@whitman.edu - A lost and found list.

Adding yourself to a mailing list is called subscribing. You also have the option to remove yourself from any of these lists (unsubscribe) if you are not interested in receiving the mailings.

There is also a third option, called “Digest”, that lets you receive the postings from the email list with out getting a constant stream of mail from the list. If you subscribe to a list digest you will receive one message from the list every day that will containing all the individual postings made to the list in the last 24 hours, it also has a nice header which indexes the subjects of the enclosed message so you can quickly locate items of interest in the digest.

Changing Your Subscription Options for Mailing Lists

You can subscribe or unsubscribe yourself to one of the lists or change to a digest by going to the following these steps:

1. Go to the Web page http://people.whitman.edu/~alias/stulists
2. Log in using your Marcus name and password. A web page displaying your current setting for various mail lists will appear.
3. Click on the radio button to the option you want, and then click the "Change my Settings" button.
4. Click on the "Log Out" button.

Once you have subscribed to an email list or a list digest it is easy to post a message to a mailing list:

• Compose your message and send it to list@whitman.edu (substitute list with the name of the list you are posting to).
• If you are posting to any list besides students@whitman.edu, after your posting is sent you will need to check for new messages. There should be a new message from list-reject .... The subject will say "MODERATE for list@whitman.edu". Go to this message and open it so you can read it.
• You must reply to this message using the Reply-To address. Send it and you're done!

This confirmation system helps ensure that people don't forge messages from others and have them posted to the whole campus. However, it is possible that if you leave your email account open for someone else to walk up and start using, someone would be able to post messages to the campus under your name. Remember to log out of your email when you are not using it.

These email lists make it more convenient to reach a large number of people, but they have a downside, evidenced by the large amount of messages that are constantly filling our inboxes. We need to be considerate and careful with messages posted to these community lists. Before you post something to a community email list, think about the message, are you sending it to the correct list? Is email the best way to get your message out? Consider how you would react getting a similar message from someone else?

Mike Quiner is the Director of Administrative Technology at Whitman College. You can reach him at quinerm@whitman.edu.