CommunityData:Email

Getting on the CDSC email lists is important for not missing any important updates, announcements, or materials that may or may not be shared during weekly meetings. There are two kinds email addresses that CDSC uses:

1. Email lists are full-fledged email lists that are being run using Mailman 3 software. Lists have members, include the ability to moderate message, have a nice web-based interface for viewing and searching for old messages. There is a lot of flexibility in terms of lists in terms of how you can configure them. Lists can be publicly visible (or not) , publicly joinable (or not), announce only (or a free for all), or whatever.
2. Aliases are basically just forwarding addresses. An email alias will just rely email sent to it to one or more other addresses. They cannot be configured in any way beyond this.

Email Lists

You can find a list of our mailing lists on this webpage. There are a number of number of email lists for communication among CDSC community members listed on that page but here's a quick overview of some key ones:

• community@communitydata.science — A public list for announcements and conversation among CDSC members, affiliates, alumni, friends, fellow travelers, and others.
• collective-uw@communitydata.science — Current CDSC research faculty, students, staff at UW.
• collective-nu@communitydata.science — Current CDSC research faculty, students, staff at Northwestern.
• collective-purdue@communitydata.science — Current CDSC research faculty, students, staff at Purdue.
• hyak-cdsc@communitydata.science — users of the CDSC hyak allocation
• anonymity-team@communitydata.science — participants for the The Anonymity Project (NSF funded project with Drexel and NYU)
• learning@communitydata.science — discussion and coordination of research on informal learning in online communities
• fsb2430@communitydata.science — Coordinate and manage the group's shared (with the CollabLab) working space in room 2-430 of the Frances Searle Building.

Email aliases

There are also a number of email aliases. Most of these are just for individual members for some are important. These are the key ones:

• collective@communitydata.science — Members of all the pother previous "collective" lists. Please note: this is the address you should send to if you want a message to go to all current collective members at all campuses.
• collective-unc@communitydata.science — Current CDSC research faculty, staff, students at UNC
• dyr@communitydata.science

Subscribing to a list

To join any of the lists or view their addresses, go here (you may need/want to create an account when you submit a subscription request if you want to manage any of the settings):

• https://communitydata.science/mailman3/postorius

Adding/Updating Email Aliases

Members of lists should be able to request a password and remove themselves from an email list on their own. They do by navigating to the appropriate page on our mailing list server.

For help being added or removed from a list, contact either:

• Nate TeGrotenhuis <nathante@uw.edu>
• Jeremy Foote <jdfoote@purdue.edu>
• Benjamin Mako Hill <makohill@uw.edu>
• Aaron Shaw <aaronshaw@northwestern.edu>

These people all have a super-user password and are administrators on all lists. If you want to be one of those people to spread out the work/responsibility (♥!) contact one of the people above.

"My email to collective@ is being held"

To address issues of spam, our email lists will not relay email except from list members and an additional group of people who have been whitelisted on a list-by-list basis. That means that when you send email the collective email address, it will send it to multiple to lists and will, by default, be held for moderation by any list that you are not on. This can be a little confusing.

For example, if you are at UW and email the whole group for the first time, your email will go out to the collective-uw list but you will get a moderation email from the list saying that your list has not to the folks on the collective-nu folks or collective-purdue folks, and so on. In general, you don't need to worry or do anything.

The administrators of the list will get a notification and will check and approve your email. After you send mail once or twice, the admin will add you to the whitelist so that your email goes through automatically in the future. If it's very urgent. You can click through the page on the list, find the administrators for the list that is holding your message, and ping them.

Notes for moderators

To approve a message

Log into the CDSC Postorius interface. Once you're in, click on "Held Messages." The rest should be clear.

To whitelist a user

Every time a user sends a message to the list the first, their mail will be moderated. You can whitelist these users by clicking on Users→Non Members→Non Members Options (next to the user you want to whitelist). At the bottom of the page this takes you to, scroll to "Adminstration options" and Change the value of "Moderation" to "Accept immediately (bypass other rules)". That's it!

Technical Notes

Mail isn't being delivered at all!

On at least one occasion, Mailman became stuck and stopped delivering mail! To restart it, someone with root/sudo access on nada needs to ssh into the sever and then run:

$ sudo sysemctl restart mailman3 mailman3-web

This should be a harmless command to run at any point so this is a good "first resort" anytime there are mailing list problems. If that still doesn't work, contact a member of the IT Crowd.

Adding Lists

To make a new list, you first need root on nada.com.washington.edu. Run the following command:

$ sudo -u list mailman create --notify --owner <OWNER_EMAIL1> --owner <OWNER EMAIL2> <FULL LIST EMAIL ADDRESS>

Second, visit the web interface Mailman web interface. Log in with an administrator account and/or ask one of the current admins (e.g., Mako or Aaron) to make you an administrator for the mailing list you just created.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Once you set up the list, make sure you go into Settings → DMARC Mitigations and then set DMARK mitigation action to "Replace From: with list address" and then set DMARC Mitigate unconditionally to "Yes". If you skip this step, some users (especially GMail users) will silently have their mail not delivered. It's probably a good idea to edit the stuff related to the other settings too!

Updating/Configuring Lists

Most changes can simply be made on our mailing list website.

If you are created an email that sits behind an alias (e.g., collective-purdue@ sits behind collective@) you should visit the postorius page for the list and navigate to "Settings→Message Acceptance" and edit the "Acceptable aliases" so it says something like:

^collective-uw@communitydata.cc
^collective@communitydata.cc
^collective@communitydata.science
^cdsc-all@communitydata.science

Adding/Updating Aliases

The alias file lives on nada, at /etc/postfix/virtual. You will need root access to edit it. After editing, run

 $ sudo postmap /etc/postfix/virtual

to make it active.