Mailing Lists @ CSE

What is a Mailing List?

Mailing lists provide a single email address for a group of people. CSE provides a number of lists for the purpose of keeping people informed of topics relevant to the school and/or their research interests. Some of these lists are tabulated below. They are all based upon mlalias which has a CLI.

There is also a mailman installation for people who require a web-based front-end for their mailing list. These lists live at http://lists.cse.unsw.edu.au/. Since mailman is more flexible for users than mlalias CSG prefers new mailing lists to be created under mailman.

Regardless of whether you use mlalias or mailman to maintain your mailing list it requires authorisation from SS to set one up.

NOTE: Not all people are eligible to be on all lists. Lists can be open or closed (among other things). Anyone can add themselves to an open list (using the mlalias command), but only an owner of a closed list can add people to that list.

You can find out about joining, using and creating local mailing lists by having a look at the mlalias manual page.

There is a searchable index of the School's mail aliases and a collection of archived mailing lists.

There are recommended guidelines for reading and writing email.

Emailing all students in a Plan, Program, or Course

There are two ways of creating a mailing list based on enrolments:

1. Use an enrol pageboy address which is based directly on official enrolment records for specific years and sessions. The enrol pageboy is the best way of addressing students officially enrolled in any arbitrarily complex expression of course, plan, or program enrolments coming from a combination of years and sessions. It is also the only way of specifying enrolments in plans. A full description (with many examples) is given at the page on the enrol pageboy.
2. Use a virtual address based on a class within CSE's User DataBase (UDB) that is itself based on official enrolments. However, since UDB classes are primarily used for account management, UDB classes that are based on official enrolments do not always accurately reflect current official enrolments because of overriding account management considerations. As such, addresses based on UDB classes based on official enrolments are not the best way of emailing all students in a degree or course. Also, virtual addresses are not as flexible nor as powerful as enrol pageboy specifications, and cannot be used as a means of addressing students enrolled in a plan at all. See a more detailed description in the Virtual addresses FAQ.

Note: Both forms of address lists are restricted.

Some Potentially Useful/Interesting Mailing Lists

• School of Computer Science and Engineering
  • Student Office
  • Staff
  • Students
  • Committees
  • Miscellaneous
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Systems Engineering Group
• Information Science Department Engineering Group
• UNSW Medical Imaging Group
• Particular Software and Hardware
• Australasian Chinese Association on EECS
• Student Society Contacts