Mailing List Naming Conventions

Overview

The University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) has adopted the following naming conventions for mailing lists. Other services may employ different conventions.

Note
UAA operates a fairly large, and active Listserv service which has been running for over fifteen years. During this time, several hundred mailing lists have been created at varying times. As such, different standards and guidelines have been in effect regarding list names, and existing lists reflect the standards in place at the time they were created. Existing lists may have names which differ from, or are inconsistent with, the standards defined here. The standardisation of list names for existing lists will be a major project in the long term and list owners will be contacted when that project begins. At this time there is no date currently scheduled for this project.
Important
Mailing lists will not be created for academic classes. Course instructors should use the University of Alaska (UA) Learning Management System (LMS) (aka Blackboard Learn) to communicate course related information to their students.

In this article:

General Requirements

All new mailing lists, both Standard and Dynamic, must conform to the following standards:

  • The "local part" (the text before the "@" symbol) must not be longer than 64 characters.
  • The characters used are limited to the characters in the Roman alphabet (i.e. a-z, A-Z) without diacritic's (aka accent) (e.g. å, é, ê, etc.), and Arabic numerals (i.e. 0-9).
  • Words must be separated with a hyphen ( - ) (aka hyphen-minus) character (e.g. UAA-Web-Board).
  • Abbreviations and/or acronyms should be avoided, although commonly used ones may be used (e.g. CAS, CBPP, CoENG, CTC, UAA, etc.)
  • List names should be representative of the list's general purpose (e.g. mac-users-group), or audience (e.g. UAA-Web-Board).
  • List names should be unique, and not be confused with similar resources across the UA system. For Example:
    • "Library-Staff" is generic and could represent any one of the various campus libraries throughout the UA system. This should instead be either campus specific (e.g. "UAA-APU-Consortium-Library-Staff", "KRC-Library-Staff", etc.), or system generic (e.g. "ua-system-library-staff").
  • All dynamic mailing list names must end with the dynamic list suffix (e.g. "-dl").

List Name Examples

Good Examples

The following are examples of some mailing list names which meet the recommended naming conventions.

  • CAS-Alumni
  • UAA-Biology-Faculty
  • UAA-Sustainability

Bad Examples

The following are examples of some mailing list names which do not meet the recommended naming conventions.

  • Biology-Faculty
  • Bfin-users
  • DAC

Is there any additional information I should know about?

Exceptions may apply for when a requested Mailing list doesn't suit any of the above criteria. These exceptions will be at the sole discretion of UAA IT Services.

Need additional help or have issues

For support, requests may be submitted anytime by Requesting Support for the Mailing List service. Support Requests are worked by Priority based on the Impact and Urgency of need as well as the order they are received by the IT Employees with the knowledge and permissions to assist with the request.

For immediate assistance please review the Contact Us page for ways to contact the appropriate support group.

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