E-mail Mailing Lists

The University maintains two types of mailing lists for reaching the campus community.

Broadcast e-mail lists - can send mail to the entire campus or selected groups on campus. The office of University Communications uses these lists and my.iwu announcements to send official university messages. Contact University Communications if you need to send such an official annoucement.

Voluntary e-mail lists (aka listservs) - reach only those people who choose to receive messages from these lists (i.e. subscribe.) See below for more information about these lists.

Using voluntary e-mail lists

The office of Information Technology provides e-mail lists to promote communication in support of the University's mission. (Listserv is the common name used for an automated e-mail mailing list.) By joining a list you can receive and send e-mail with others interested in the topic of that mailing list. Most of the Illinois Wesleyan e-mail lists run from an intranet server named "lists" using a program called mailman.

If you are on campus, or using the campus proxy server, you will find a web interface to the mailman program on the lists.iwu.edu server. Off-campus users can send commands to the mailman listservs by sending commands in an e-mail message.

To subscribe or join a list using e-mail commands, follow this steps:

1. Open a mail program which sends mail from the address you want to unsubscribe.
2. Send a mail to the list unsubscribe address, which will be of the form LISTNAME-join@lists.iwu.edu. The subject and body of this message will be ignored, so it doesn't matter what you put there.

To unsubscribe from a list using e-mail commands, follow these steps:

1. Open a mail program which sends mail from the address you want to unsubscribe.
2. Send a mail to the list unsubscribe address, which will be of the form LISTNAME-leave@lists.iwu.edu. The subject and body of this message will be ignored, so it doesn't matter what you put there.

To send mail to a list, send your e-mail message to the listname@lists.iwu.edu. For example, to send to the facforum listserv, send mail to:

facforum@lists.iwu.edu 

For additional help with mailing lists, see the mailman on-line manual, or contact the Information Technology Help Desk at 309-556-3900.