Mailing List

The VCHSS Mailing List

The VCHSS provides its members with the ability to communicate with each other through a common forum known as a mailing list. By sending an email to this mailing list, users are able to immediately send messages of interest to a larger group of people - all of whom have expressed an interest in getting those notices. The address to use to send an email to everyone on the mailing list is vchss@vchss.org

Joining or exiting from the mailing list is done by simply sending what is known as a control message to the mailing list. These messages do not go to all of the subscribers to the mailing list.

The only thing necessary to join or exit the mailing list is to send an email with the word "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" (don't include the quotes) in the first line of the message text, to vchss@vchss.org. Please read the note below because depending on your settings you may receive an error message in reply.

IMPORTANT: Control messages are special email messages sent to the list address which affect only yourself but not the other members. Control messages must be sent as plain text; (HTML text won’t be recognized). If your mail client is configured to send email in HTML format, you'll get an error message with words to the effect that you don't have permission. Most (if not all) e-mail clients can be configured to send messages as HTML text - so if yours is set to use anything but plain text, you'll have to change your settings if you want to use these control messages. If you're unsure of how to make these changes, or are unable to join or exit the mailing list, you can also send a plain language email to the "web guy" and we'll add or delete you from the list. Send your plain language request to boumaj@nosc.mil

Other key words to use in the first line of the text are the following - along with their results.

Key Word	Expected Result
Subscribe	subscribes the sender to the list
Unsubscribe	removes the sender from the list
Mode_Digest	changes the subscriber to “digest" mode. In this mode, rather than receive individual messages, messages will accumulate until there are a number of messages waiting for delivery. The current setting is 5 messages will trigger a single update to those receiving via the digest mode.
Mode_normal	Disables digest mode. From this point on, the subscriber will receive all messages as they're submitted.
List	returns a list of all the mailing lists on the server
Help	sends a helpful message

Note: current settings limit a digest to just over 1 meg of message traffic. The intent was to prevent excessive download times for large digests.

The VCHSS mailing list is currently configured to have a maximum of 500 recipients per send. This is only provided to let you know how many people you can embarrass yourself in front of! :o)

The maximum size of any message sent to the mailing list is currently set at 500K. This was considered large enough that users could send photo's and other attachments, but yet small enough to have reasonable download times.

If you receive a message via the mailing list, clicking reply will forward the response back to the entire mailing list. If you wish to respond only to the sender, take note of his address and send only to that person.

Users are welcome to provide comments about the mailing list at any time, to the officers of the VCHSS (http://www.postyard.com/vchss) or to the person hosting the web page and the mailing list - boumaj@nosc.mil