School mailing lists

Some (not all) of the mailing lists used within SMSAS (updated September 2019)

A number of mailing lists are used within SMSAS. This blog post provides details of some of the key ones. Make sure you understand the distinction between mailing lists and mailboxes before you start using these: the addresses can appear very similar at first glance.

The key visible difference in the addresses is the presence or absence of punctuation. Kent mailbox addresses seldom include any punctuation except a stop between initials (viz J.K.Bloggs@kent.ac.uk though some common names may appear like this: J.Smith-555@kent.ac.uk).
SMSAS mailing list addresses always include a hyphen.

The distinction is very important because emails sent to a mailing list will be received by every member of that list.

Only “kent.ac.uk” email addresses can send messages to the mailing lists. Circulation to list members is handled by a system named sympa, see https://lists.kent.ac.uk

Your email client (Outlook, for example) will not know that an address is for a list rather than a single mailbox. Before sending a message it is definitely worth investing an extra second or two to make quite sure that you have selected the correct list address(es). You will not be prompted with any alerts such as “Are you sure…?”.

  1. The following mailing lists are used to circulate messages to SMSAS taught students:
  1. The list named ims-pg@kent.ac.uk is used to email Postgraduate Research students.
  1. smsas-staff@kent.ac.uk is used to email all SMSAS Staff (i.e. it aggregates 4, 5, and 6 below).
  2. smsas-ts@kent.ac.uk  circulates to the subset of academic staff classified as “teaching and scholarship”.
  3. smsas-tr@kent.ac.uk is a different subset of academic staff classified as “teaching and research” (it is mainly used to send out funding alerts).
  4. smsas-ps@kent.ac.uk is for SMSAS professional services staff.
  5. actsci-students@kent.ac.uk emails all students on Actuarial Science programmes (undergraduate AND postgraduate). This doubles up as a list for the Invicta Actuarial Society.
  6. smsas-casri-staff emails staff in the CASRI/Actuarial Science group
  7. smsas-maths-staff emails staff who are members of the Mathematics research group
  8. smsas-stats-staff emails staff who are members of the Statistics research group
  9. smsas-stats-pgrs emails postgraduate research students who are members of the Statistics research group

If, for example, you wish to email all academic staff BUT NOT professional services staff include both address 4 and address 5 in the “To:” settings for your email. Similarly if you wished to forward a message to members of the Maths and the Stats groups you’d need to use both address 9 and address 10.

 

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