Course & Subject Based Mailing Lists

Since March 1997, a facility has been made available for academic staff to send electronic mail to all students enrolled in a particular course or subject.

Mailing lists for this purpose are generated on a regular basis on the new student mail server. These lists are comprised of all students enrolled in a given course or subject who have generated an account for themselves on one of the ITS mail-servers.

To send mail to a list, simply use an appropriate address of the form:

s-@studentlists.unimelb.edu.au

c-@studentlists.unimelb.edu.au

For example, mailing to:

s-136101@studentlists.unimelb.edu.au

would send mail to all students enrolled in the subject '136-101' ('History of Astronomy') who have generated an account on a student mail server. Similarly,

c-012@studentlists.unimelb.edu.au

would send mail to all students enrolled in the course '012' who have generated an account for themselves.

For further information about student electronic mail access in general, please see the web-page to be found at:

http://www.unimelb.edu.au/student/IT-handbook

Any problems should be directed to the ITS HotLine on 44488 or email to hotline@its.unimelb.edu.au.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. When I send mail to a list, not all students enrolled in the course/subject receive the mail.

Only those students who are enrolled in the course/subject AND have generated an account for themselves on the appropriate ITS student mail-server will receive the mail you send. Students who have not yet generated an account for themselves are encouraged to do so in order to receive your mail.

Information about generating such an account is available in the Student Handbook, or from the Operations Counter at ITS (800 Swanston Street).

2. Some students are not receiving the mail I send, but claim to have generated an account.

Some students have other electronic-mail accounts with their local faculty/department, but have not yet generated an account on one of the ITS mail-servers. In order to receive mail from one of the lists, they must have an account on an ITS server. If they wish, they may arrange to have their mail forwarded to their local account from there.

Alternatively, some students exceed their disk-quota (see [3]), or unintentionally redirect their mail to some invalid address.

3. When I send mail to a list, I get one or more bounce messages like this: Your message cannot be delivered to the following recipients:

Recipient address: jbloggs

Original address: s-202101@studentlists.unimelb.edu.au

Reason: Error writing to /var/spool/mail/jbloggs (Disc quota exceeded)

This is because one or more members of the list you sent mail to have exceeded their disk-quota. Each student has a fixed quota on the mail-server, and when they exceed this, they are no longer able to receive new mail, resulting in the generation of bounce messages.

Users receive a warning message when they login if they are over quota (that is, have too much mail stored on the server), and should endeavour to free up space as quicklyas possible when this happens. Users who are over quota will receive no new mail until they rectify this situation.

Note that the mail you sent would have been successfully delivered to other recipients on the list who were not over quota at the time.

4. I want to send mail to students who are enrolled in a subject during a *given semester*. How can I do this?

There are a number of lists available which allow you to specify a semester. These lists are of the form:

Subject 222-102, Semester 1:

s-222101-1@studentlists.unimelb.edu.au

Subject 222-102, Semester 2:

s-222101-2@studentlists.unimelb.edu.au

Maintainer: Debbie Emerson itsnews@its.unimelb.edu.au