Mailing Lists

Mailing lists are a good way to communicate with your members, and let them talk to each other by email. If you already have a mailing list, we have some helpful instructions on how to run it.

Types of list

  • Discussion lists, where members can post and talk amongst themselves
  • Moderated announcement lists, where only the moderator (one or more people who know a password) can post
  • Restricted lists where you have the option of preventing people joining without the list owners consent. This is useful where you want to limit the list subscriptions to just your members
  • You can also have a message board or discussion forum

A society can have as many mailing lists as it needs.

Waldo runs the mailman software with a set of webpages as the adminstrative interface.

Applying for a mailing list

If you want a mailing list, mail root@umu.man.ac.uk with a request and include the following information:

  • The list name - cakesoc-members, for example. Please use hypens not underscores and try to keep it meaningful to your members. Calling your list 'mailing-list' is not the most descriptive of names

All membership information is held in such a way that people cannot see who is subscribed to your mailing list. There are effectively no limits to mailing list size, or the number of people who can be subscribed to a mailing list.

All configuration of lists, apart from initial creation, is done by the society's list admin through the web interface. To set your list to require approval before posting ("moderated"), in Privacy options then Sender filters, set "By default, should new list member postings be moderated?" to yes, and then add everyone to your mailing list. If you already have people on your list, looking at the Membership Management page, there's an option at the bottom to turn moderation on for everyone.

If you have a domain or subdomain of man.ac.uk hosted on Waldo, then you can have your mailing list at an address in that domain, rather than in the umu.man.ac.uk domain which is where it would otherwise go. Just mention it when requesting the list be created.

If you wish to look elsewhere for a mailing list, try the University's mailing list server at lists.man.ac.uk.

The services described here are for University of Manchester Students' Union registered societies only. All requests must be made from yoursociety@umsu.man.ac.uk to root@umsu.man.ac.uk.