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Dear colleagues,

This message has been sent to members of the continuing-education mailbase
list.  If you think you should not have received it, please check the list
membership at http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists-a-e/continuing-education/ where
you will find information about how to join, leave and contribute to the list.

Mailbase (which will be replaced from 1st August 2000 by the Council for the
Central Laboratories of the Research Councils - for details see
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/news/future.html) provides the national e-mail
mailing list service for the UK academic sector, and is the organisation which
currently provides the facilities for the continuing-education list.

There are three co-owners of the list: Andrew Stevenson (Lancaster), Ian Ground
(Newcastle) and Linda McLeod (Edinburgh), who are jointly responsible for the
running of the list.

There are a number of options that the list owners may set.  You can see the
current configuration at
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/cgi-bin/stats?continuing-education.

In view of recent off-topic traffic, the list-owners have now changed two of
these options so that 

a) replies to messages sent to the list will go to the sender, not the whole
list 

b) only list members may send messages to the list (though anybody will still
be allowed to join the list).

The benefit of a) will be that the "please send me info" or "I can read you"
type messages will no longer be circulated to the whole list.  

The negative side to this will be that if you *do* want your message/response
to be seen by the whole list, you will have to send your message explicitly to
[log in to unmask] (i.e. change the address your message is
being sent to!)  

On the whole, the list owners do not think this will be unduly detrimental to
the list as it has in recent months been used by members more as a forum for
advertising events rather than discussion of the current hot potatoes in CE.
(Maybe we're short of hot potatoes, which is only to be welcomed!)  
The other main source of traffic on the list comprises requests for
information: this should not be unduly affected by the change, as the preferred
format for such surveys is that people should reply to the person asking the
question, who will then send a summary of responses to the list.  These surveys
are often valuable (if only in highlighting things other depts should be
thinking about), so we encourage them: but please remember to post a summary of
responses you receive.

Implementing b) (i.e. non-list-members may not send to the list) will, it is
hoped, cut down the number of "spam" or junk e-mails that are sent via the
list.  Anyone may still join the list, but mailbase has ways of detecting
people who join lists merely in order to send "spam" and filtering their
e-mails.


Andrew Stevenson
Ian Ground
Linda McLeod.

You can reach the listowners at the following e-mail address:
[log in to unmask]



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