Mailing list availability and entitlement

Email distribution lists are provided in line with the general University Computing Regulations namely that these facilities are made available for staff in accordance with their normal duties of employment and students in connection with their University education.

"Education" where appropriate includes research. Other use may be allowed, as a privilege and not a right, and if abused may be treated as a contravention of these regulations.

Lists may contain external mail addresses and may be used for collaboration with other institutions or groups.

The Information Services policy on the provision of mailing lists is:

1. IS provides mailing lists for the academic or business purposes of University Departments or other University Units.
2. Additionally, as a service to University members, IS provides lists for primarily internal University use which further the cultural and social activities of the University.
3. Every list has a "list owner address" which, amongst other things, provides email contact with the list owner. In order to ensure that the list owner is a member of the University, and to allow us to maintain contact with the list owner, this address must be internal to the University.
4. In order to ensure that lists are maintained on an ongoing basis, IS reserves the right to shut down any list should the list owner address become invalid, or should it fail to respond to messages sent to it within a reasonable amount of time.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) considerations:

If your list is for university business between university members, you may ignore the following text, otherwise you should be aware that this service is based on the Sympa software product which imposes some technical limits on how you will manage subscribers and their data.

1. Sympa does not record whether a subscriber gave consent to be added to a list or not. List owners will have to maintain this information in their own way.
2. Sympa adds standard mail headers which include unsubscribe information to all outgoing messages. However, many of today's common mail clients do not display this to recipients.
3. Lists can be configured to append footer text to all outgoing messages, optionally including an unsubscribe link. However, this text is not always displayed by mail clients so must not be relied upon.
4. Unsubscribe links in messages require web authentication when followed, and are therefore only appropriate for university members.