A staple of NCFR’s online communications strategy for nearly a decade has been the use of e-mail listservs to facilitate communication to and among members. The purpose of this article is to explain the scope and purpose of NCFR listservs.

NCFR currently maintains five dozen e-mail listservs, the majority of which fall into the following categories: sections, affiliate councils, and focus groups. If you’re a member of a section or focus group, or if you reside in a geographic area covered by an affiliate council, you have been subscribed. All active mem-bers are also subscribed to NCFR’s weekly news and announcements list (Zippy News), to new content alerts for the journals included with your membership, and all CFLEs are subscribed to the CFLE discussion list.

NCFR subscribes members to e-mail listservs on an opt-out basis. The mechanism is automated via a weekly scripted integration between our database and ListManager software, and every welcome message contains a link to unsubscribe (opt out) from that list. An e-mail address to unsubscribe also exists at the bottom of each listserv message you receive.

The unsubscribe address at the bottom of each message is unique for each recipient. Occasionally a discussion gets going and multiple e-mail footers pile up, then someone mistakenly clicks on the wrong unsubscribe address. The software is smart enough to correlate the e-mail address sending the           re-quest to the e-mail address being unsub-scribed, and if they don’t match it sends back an e-mail asking you to confirm. So if you get a request to confirm unsubscribing from a listserv, and you didn’t actually request that, just ignore it and you’ll remain on the list.

You may view listserv archives and manage your subscriptions by visiting www.ncfr.org/listserv-archive and logging in with your e-mail address. This portal gives you access to view the sent message archives, as well as access to modify your subscription preferences (such as whether you prefer receiving messages as they’re sent or in a daily digest format).

Discussion listservs are configured only to accept and relay messages from other subscribed members. Unfortunately it is still necessary to screen incoming messages through a junk filter to prevent the listservs from relaying malicious spam if a member’s e-mail account gets hacked. To this end, we implemented Google Message Security, which has been effective at stopping spam but also sometimes quarantines legitimate messages. NCFR staff checks the quarantine frequently and lets those false positives through as we see them. If you’ve sent a listserv message that took a couple days to go through, this is likely the cause. Your messages should start going through immediately. If you don’t see a copy in your inbox within 15 minutes, please contact us and we’ll figure out the cause.

Other things to keep in mind when sending a message to an NCFR listserv are the size limit (no more than 200kb) and the requirement that the address you’re sending from exactly match your subscription address. Sometimes e-mail clients are configured with slight differences in the “sent from” address. In those cases, NCFR staff can set up an alias for you so that ListManager knows to accept messages from it. Again, please let us know if you don’t see your message come through within 15 minutes.

The listservs exist to facilitate member communication, and we encourage you to make frequent use of them. If you have questions regarding what is and is not an appropriate use of the listservs, please see www.ncfr.org/listserv-terms-use. For any other listserv questions, feel free to contact me at jasonsamuels@ncfr.org