Welcome to the December issue of the JISCMail Newsletter (The LISTSERV 16.0 newsletter template used is sunset-left). I do hope you are enjoying the sample of new Newsletter templates that we have brought to you in the last four issues. These easy to use templates will allow owners to produce smart professional looking online Newsletters without the need for HTML knowledge and should be available to use in March 2010. As we rapidly approach 2010 it is worthwhile summarising a few of the changes that the JISCMail team have made during the year.

• Social Bookmarking was added to the service
• We joined the Tweeters on Twitter
• Circulated over 210 million messages
• Increased our membership to 229 countries
• A new monthly Newsletter was generated
• Released enhancements to online Surveys
• Staff relocated to a brand new building

We look forward to next year with the same enthusiasm as this and on behalf of myself and the JISCMail team, I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Penny Windebank
JISCMail Director

We are pleased to announce that we have made enhancements to our survey tool. You are now able to download survey results in a number of formats including PDF, XML and CSV. We have enhanced the tab separated file to put the labels and results in different columns for easy data manipulation. Other enhancements include the following:

• Save your results to the files area of your JISCMail group.
• Email your results to your registered email address or your JISCMail group.
• A link from the Surveys page to the Survey management section.
• More intuitive buttons on the create/modify a survey page.
• Added an extra question type of ‘Tick all choices that apply'
• The survey tool enables you to create a survey, post it to a JISCMail group and download the results in a variety of formats.

Surveys are completely free with no limit on questions, responses or number of surveys you can create. You can survey an existing community on JISCMail (if you are the list owner) or create your own surveys group. We have 8 different question types to enable quick survey creation. We pride our service on being spam and virus free and secure with the use of SSL.

Access the surveys tool via list management or on the homepage of your group (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/yourgroupname).

Staff from JISCMail and JISC Legal have been working together and are pleased to offer access to ‘JISC Legal’ from the JISCMail Tools area of all list homepages.

JISC Legal, a JISC Advance service, works to ensure that legal issues do not become a barrier to the adoption and use of new information and communications technologies in further education, higher education and specialist colleges.

Changing Logos

From your list homepage, go to List Management>Customization>Web Templates

edit BODY-GLOBAL-HEADER
And replace



Replace the JISCMail URL, image location, title and alt text. For example:

Change the style of your navigational bar

From your list homepage, go to List Management>Customization>Web Templates

Edit STYLESHEET-GLOBAL

Find the section headed: +* Style for top-level navigation bar

Change the &+MENUBACK; text within the line below to the url of one of your own images.
background-image: url("&+MENUBACK;");

With this you can change the look of your menu bar from this:



To this:

There have been some problems with hotmail addresses on the JISCMail service recently.

The first is that the Hotmail relay has been listed in the JANET Realtime Blackhole list. This may mean that Hotmail users also have problems sending to other ac.uk addresses as those site are likely to be using the same JANET blocklist.

More info can be found at at http://www.ja.net/services/mail/janet-rbl/dnsbls.html where you can check your IP address.

Another problem that some users have experienced, is that Hotmail occasionally sends an automatic 'sign off' command to Listserv which Listserv then responds to. If this happens, please go to www.jiscmail.ac.uk/listname (where 'listname' is the name of your chosen list) for a
link to re-subscribe.

However, in the light of these problems, we do recommend using an alternative to Hotmail or Yahoo wherever possible. Using your institutional email address will ensure that we can easily troubleshoot any problems you may have, whereas Hotmail and Yahoo do not provide a 'human' support service.