There are several important points to keep in mind regarding the use of the department mailing lists.

• Only uoregon.edu email addresses are allowed to be added to the department mailing lists. If you have a personal email account (i.e. – Gmail) and try to send a message to one of our lists, it will be blocked. You must send the message from your official uoregon.edu account.
• There are generally only two ways that anyone can send a message out to a particular list’s membership:
  1. The sender’s email address is a member of that list
  2. The sender’s email address has been added as an “approved sender” for that list
  • If neither of the above two points is true for the email address being used to send a message to the list, the proposed message will be automatically blocked from being sent to the list members. However, from the sender’s email program’s perspective, the message will appear to have sent successfully.

• The main function of the mailing lists is to allow a particular group of people to easily send mass communications to all other members of only that group. To prevent spam, the lists are set to block messages sent from all non-member email addresses. As a member of the list, you will be able to send messages to it, and will receive copies of all messages sent to the list. If you are added as an “approved sender” for a list (as opposed to being added as a full member), you will be able to send messages to the list, but you will not receive any of the list messages. This functionality is generally used in two cases:
  1. Administrative staff need to send out messages to specific groups, even though they are not members of those groups
     • By default, all administrative staff members are added to the “approved senders” list for all of the faculty mailing lists (i.e. – psych_faculty and its subordinate lists). In this way, any administrative staff member can send a mass communication to any of the faculty groups without receiving all of the faculty emails, themselves.
  2. Faculty and staff need to send out messages to student groups, even though they are not members of those groups
  • • By default, all faculty members are added to the “approved senders” list for all of the student mailing lists (i.e. – psych_gradstud and its subordinate lists). In this way, any faculty member can send a mass communication to any of the grad student groups without receiving all of the grad student emails, themselves.

• Since mailing lists are not the same as regular email accounts, they generally don’t show up as auto-complete as-you-type options in your email program’s “To:” field until you have sent a message to that list at least once in the past.
• Although there is a hierarchy among some of the lists (i.e. – members of psych_1styears are a subset of the membership of psych_gradstud), they are not explicitly linked.
  • A parent list contains all of the members of its subordinate lists, but sending a message to a subordinate lists DOES NOT send a copy of the message to the parent list as well.
• Sending rules apply to CCs and BCCs; not just to primary recipients.
  • If you are not a member of a particular list (or one of its approved senders), you cannot CC or BCC a message to that list. For example, if you send a message where the primary recipient is a list of which you are a member, and also CC that message to another list on which you are NOT a member, your email will successfully reach the former, but not the latter.

• If you are trying to send an email to more than one sub-group within the department, but don’t want the message to go to all members of the parent list, you can add each of the desired lists to the “To:” field of your new message (just as you would if addressing a message to multiple people with individual addresses).
  • Example: I am a member of the adminstrative staff and I want to send a message to all tenured, tenure track, and adjunct faculty, but not to the non-tenure-track faculty. If I send the message to psych_faculty, that would include the non-tenure-track members. Therefore, when I create my new message, I will add psych_tenured, psych_tentrack and psych_adjuncts to the “To:” field of my message.