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Mailing Lists at the University of Birmingham List Owner's Guide What are Lists Used for?

There are two main uses for mailing lists at The University of Birmingham. The main use of lists is to allow distribution of email to a group of people with a common purpose or interest. This can range from discussion of a subject area with international membership to matters concerning an internal departmental committee.

The other use at Birmingham is to provide a functional mailname providing a contact address. Typically such lists consist of only one or two email addresses. Such addresses are useful for permanent addresses such as a school or departmental address or for temporary addresses such as those used for administration of a conference. Some of the reasons for implementing contact addresses in this way are historic. Whilst this mechanism is still available, a better alternative has recently been implemented for any new contact addresses. It is much simpler to set up an address in the domain "contacts.bham.ac.uk" for such addresses. This allows much greater freedom in choice of address, as the domain is not shared with personal addresses and usernames.