Listserv Upgrade
July 2005

Dear Club Presidents:

I'm forwarding this message to you regarding listserv upgrades from our IT Director, (something I know many of you will be very pleased to hear
about!)

Best,

Nory

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Dear alumni volunteers,

As part of an ongoing effort to improve the communications tools available to all alumni and to alumni leaders such as you, we are happy to announce that we are upgrading our email listserv software later this month. This upgrade is in keeping with some other recent online initiatives, such as the Yale Career Network, and was the subject of much discussion at the AYA Assembly last fall.

We will be upgrading to Mailman software, one of the most popular and trusted open source list solutions. We were greatly encouraged in our research by the very positive feedback we received from other areas of the University, where Mailman has become the trusted standard software for email lists. This transition to Mailman will provide a better user experience for list subscribers. For example, Mailman allows users to make subscription change requests through a user-friendly web form instead of relying on cryptic listserv commands.

The message below is a general notification being sent to all listserv subscribers. In the coming weeks, we will be in touch with more information, including the date on which we intend to make this transition. In the meantime, please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about this or any other online service for alumni. We hope this new service will make your listservs easier and more enjoyable to use.

Best wishes from Alumni House,

Ricardo Chavira
Director of Information Technology Services Association of Yale Alumni aya.lists@yale.edu

PS: If you are not on your class or club list and wish to subscribe, you may send a message to aya.lists@yale.edu with a Subject line "Listserv Subscribe." In the body of the message, please include your name and the name of the list. Visit www.aya.yale.edu/lists for more information, including which lists are available.

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To: discussion listservs
Subject: Important news about your Yale listserv

Dear Listserv subscriber,

As part of our efforts to enhance the online services we provide to alumni, we are pleased to announce our plan to upgrade the AYA listservs. We hope that this upgrade will improve the quality of your experience with this service and make it more user-friendly. And the best part about it is that you don't need to do anything to take advantage of this upgrade!

The name of your list will not change, so you will continue sending messages to and receiving messages from the list as you do now. You should not experience any interruption in your listserv service.

What will change, however, is that the new lists will be more user-friendly and offer some improvements such as:

- Better message legibility. The new lists will support HTML and plain text emails, so you can send a message in either format. And unlike the current version, reading a message in plain text will strip out unnecessary html tags to make it more readable.

- Easier subscription management. You'll be able to change your subscription settings with an easy-to-use web interface, instead of resorting to cryptic listserv commands. So whether you want to subscribe, unsubscribe, change your email address, hold your mail if you're going on vacation, or receive mail in digest mode, all you do is fill out a simple web form.

For security reasons, attachments will still not be allowed; and the server will strip from messages any attachments sent to the list. (This will also help prevent the unintended distribution of harmful payloads if your email becomes infected with a virus.)

We hope to make this transition by the end of this month. You'll receive an additional notice in the next two weeks with further details about the process and the exact date we expect to change over. We hope this upgrade will allow you to continue to use and enjoy your email lists. If you have questions about this or any other online service, please feel free to contact us at aya.lists@yale.edu.

Best wishes from Alumni House,

Ricardo Chavira
Director of Information Technology Services Association of Yale Alumni aya.lists@yale.edu

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