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Introduction to E-lists

An e-list is a way to use email to communicate with a collection of people through a single email address, typically on a particular topic. Whenever someone sends an email message to an e-list address, that message goes out to everyone subscribed to the list.

Participation in e-lists hosted by CIT costs nothing; there are no fees of any sort. Anyone who has access to email can take advantage of the service. The service CIT uses is Lyris ListManager.

These pages fall into two main groups.

The first group describes how to create and manage CIT-hosted e-lists. (How can I tell if a particular list is hosted by CIT?)

The second group of pages deals with using e-lists as a member of one or more lists.

 

How E-lists Are Used at Cornell

E-lists can make collaboration and communication easier. Students, staff, alumni, and faculty at Cornell have discovered many ways to make use of lists in their classes, work, research, and personal lives.

  • Professors and TAs set up class lists to communicate information to students.
  • Departments use electronic lists to share information with staff members.
  • Researchers create discussion lists on topics of mutual interest.
  • Committees form lists to discuss issues and cut down on the number of meetings.
  • Student clubs and organizations registered with the Student Activities Office use lists to keep members informed of their activities.
  • Alumni groups have lists for activities related to Cornell alumni affairs.

One note of clarification: E-lists are a convenient and, usually, quick method of communicating with a group, but if you require a guaranteed "right away" delivery, you should not rely solely on lists. As with all email, there are occasional delays.

 

E-list Names

All lists hosted by CIT have names that end in "-L" so that their addresses stand out from personal or department email addresses.

For example, a list for the history department at Cornell might be called history-L@cornell.edu, in order to distinguish it from the address history@cornell.edu which could be the email address for the department office.

You can use either uppercase or lowercase when sending messages to the list or sending commands to Lyris. In this guide we follow the convention of always using an uppercase letter "L" at the end of the list name. This is simply for clarity; a lowercase letter "l" can be mistaken for the numeral one ( 1 ), an uppercase letter "I", or a vertical line ( | ).

In order to keep list names relatively short, people often choose to use common abbreviations in their names; you will often see "cu" in the name of lists running at Cornell. This abbreviation reminds people that the list was established for use at Cornell.

Since there are literally thousands of lists at Cornell, be sure to use the list's entire name when refering to it.

Note: Please do not refer to e-lists as "Listservs." In the same way that not all tissues are "Kleenex" and not all photocopies are "Xeroxes," e-list (or mailing list) is the generic term and "Listserv" is a trademarked name. So is "ListProc." We don't use those. We use Lyris ListManager to manage our e-lists. And that's just too cumbersome, so let's call them e-lists, mmmkay?

 

Other Methods of Group Communication

E-lists hosted by CIT are only one of several methods used at Cornell to facilitate group communication. Other methods include:

For example "Cornell Marketplace" is not an e-list. It is a USENET News group called cornell.marketplace.