Further advice on appropriate lists to use
With various categories of staff, undergraduate and graduate students, not to mention a large number of committees, the department has a long list of mailing lists. It can be difficult to decide which one or combination is the most appropriate to use for a particular communication.
Key lists
Some particularly useful key lists are:
- members-announce - staff, retired-staff, affiliates and graduate students (broadly the occupants of AWB)
- staff-announce - departmental staff
- postgrad-announce - DPhil and full-year MSc postgrad students (so not OMMS or MTP MSc students)
- omms-announce - 9 month OMMS MSc students
- mmathphys-announce - 9 month MathPhys MSc students
- ug-announce - undergrad students
More details
If you want to contact what might be termed “all Mathematical Institute staff” you should use
- staff-announce
which combines the following:
- academic-faculty-announce
- research-fellows-announce
- pdra-announce
- support-staff-announce
If you want to contact all staff working in the building then you should further include
- fm-staff-announce
Note: teaching-faculty-announce is a completely separate mailing list relating to the teaching faculty of mathematics and includes people outside the department and is intended for use mainly for faculty of mathematics teaching matters. Furthermore this should not be confused with tutors-all which is a mailing list to reach all college maths tutors.
If in addition you wish to include affiliate members of the Mathematical Institute (affiliates are generally individuals who are employed elsewhere in the university but are very closely involved with research within Mathematical Institute research groups, e.g. JRFs) you should add:
- affiliate-faculty-announce
- affiliate-researchers-announce
If in addition you wish to include emeritus/retired-staff members of the Mathematical Institute you should add:
- emeritus-announce
If in addition you wish to include Mathematical Institute post graduate students you should add:
- postgrad-announce (combines both research-students-announce and masters-students-announce (remembering this does not include the shorter format OMMS or MTP MSc students))
For convenience there is an umbrella list members-announce which will pass a message on to each of
- academic-faculty-announce
- affiliate-faculty-announce
- emeritus-announce
- research-fellows-announce
- pdra-announce
- affiliate-researchers-announce
- support-staff-announce
- fm-staff-announce
- postgrad-announce
This list is thus particularly useful for announcements relevant to general building, IT, financial or personnel issues which one would generally expect to announce to all members.
Note there is also a support-staff-discuss list which does not contain all the support staff and is for less formal discussion/information amongst those support staff subscribed.
If in addition you wish to include undergraduate students, and the 4th-year-undergrad-like 9 month MSc students you can add:
- ug-announce
- omms-announce
- mmathphys-announce
which gets the message to
- ug-year1-announce
- ug-year2-announce
- ug-year3-announce
- ug-year4-announce
- omms-announce
- mmathphys-announce
If you receive a “circular-type” email take note of how it has come to you, i.e. as an individual or as a member of a mailing list. If the latter, take note of which mailing list it has come through and consider carefully whether by forwarding it to another group you will be creating duplicate postings.
Large attachments can be problematic and can cause your message to bounce back. See the departmental mailing list FAQ page for full guidance. Because people don’t all use the same operating system it is best when sending attachments to send them as pdf documents (rather than say Word or LaTeX).