Mailing Lists

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The GSC operates three mailing lists (aka “listservs”) for the graduate student community.

  • GSNOTICE is a list for event announcements only, and these events generally must be Brown affiliated in some sort of official capacity. Events organized by recognized student groups fall under this heading.
  • GSBB is a list for (loosely speaking) “bulletin board” like announcements. This includes sale items, apartment listings, roommate searches, posts by people looking for tennis partners or rides to the airport, questions about the community, opinions about local services (mechanics, dentists), grad-student protocol related questions (e.g. Where do I pick up form X? Does Brown health insurance cover Y?), etc. If you’re asking a question, please check the wiki for an answer first. If you get an answer to a question you ask on GSBB, please post it to the wiki.
  • GSCOMM is meant for political discussions only. Comments about current events, opinions about the way things are handled in the grad school.

Some posts may not clearly fit into one category exactly, and, in this case, subscribers are expected to use their best judgment in choosing which listserv to post to. If you cannot decide, email the GSC Technology Officer at gsc_tech AT brown DOT edu.

Sections of this document:

  1. How do I subscribe to the mailing lists?
  2. Who receives emails sent to the lists?
  3. What’s the deal with digests?
  4. How do I send mail to the mailing lists?
  5. How do I unsubscribe?
  6. Why does the GSC have three lists?
  7. How should I behave on the listservs?
  8. What happened to the attachment I sent?

How do I subscribe to the mailing lists?

List membership is restricted to current and incoming Brown graduate students. This is a security measure to minimize the amount of spam email. You will only be able to join the listserv if you provide your first and last name. For current students, a valid @brown.edu email address is also required. Do not use alias addresses, as the listserv only recognizes your “true” email. Although you will be able to receive emails, you won’t be able to post because your “true” address is not in the database.

Since incoming students may not have a brown.edu address yet, subscription requests from them will be handled on a case-by-case basis. If you are an incoming student, please email the GSC Technology Officer at gsc_tech AT brown DOT edu at the same time that you subscribe. Tell them your name and the department to which you’ve been accepted. Subscription requests from non-Brown email addresses will be accepted at the sole discretion of the Tech Officer.

Depending on which listserv you want to join or leave, go to one of the following pages:

Click the “Join” link on that page and fill out your information. We realize that Brown’s email box has a small size limit and we recommend that you get a daily digest to avoid filling your Brown email box or get your email from Brown redirected to an alternate address.

The GSC Tech Officer must approve your subscription request; once they have done so you will receive a confirmation email. After that, you’re ready to post!

Who receives emails sent to the lists?

Distribution of the mailing lists follows a “waterfall” model:

  • Subscribers to GSNOTICE receive all mail sent to GSNOTICE.
  • Subscribers to GSBB receive all mail sent to GSNOTICE and all mail sent to GSBB.
  • Subscribers to GSCOMM receive all mail sent to GSNOTICE, all mail sent to GSBB, and all mail sent to GSCOMM.

If you sign up for multiple lists, don’t worry; the listserv engine can identify duplicates, so any given email will be sent to you only once.

I know it’s confusing, but this is the system we’ve developed in response to student needs in the past. Your best bet is probably to sign up for all three lists as a normal subscriber and then change your settings once you get a feel for the sort of mail you get.

What’s the deal with digests?

If you are on digest mode for a particular listserv, each day you will receive a single email containing all emails posted to that listserv. Digests do not span lists; that is, the digest of GSCOMM does not include any GSBB or GSNOTICE messages, and the digest of GSBB does not include any GSNOTICE messages. If you are on GSCOMM digest only, then you will receive a daily digest of GSCOMM messages, but you will also receive individual messages from the GSBB and GSNOTICE listservs. If, for example, you want to receive every message, but you want everything digested, you will have to sign up for the digest on each of the three listservs.

How do I send mail to the mailing lists?

Our mailing lists act just like regular email addresses. To send an email to all the subscribers of a list, just address the email to one of the following:

  • gsbb-l AT listserv DOT brown DOT edu
  • gsnotice-l AT listserv DOT brown DOT edu
  • gscomm-l AT listserv DOT brown DOT edu

Before your message actually gets sent out to the list subscribers, a confirmation email will be sent to you. Your message will not be distributed until you click the link in the confirmation email. Additionally, the GSC Technology Officer reviews all email sent to GSNOTICE, so there may be as much as a one-day delay between when you send a message and when it is posted. Please take this into account when announcing events.

How do I unsubscribe?

First, do not send an email to the list. It will annoy everyone on the
list, and you will still be on.

Instead, visit the same web page you would use to subscribe:

Click the “join or leave” link, and then click the “leave” button at the bottom.

If that does not work, log into any list and click the “subscriber’s corner” link at the top of the page. This will show you what lists you’re subscribed to; sometimes people don’t realize which list they’re subscribed to.

If that doesn’t work, it’s possible that the list knows you under a different address than you think it does, especially if you have forwarding installed between addresses. The best thing you can do is to try logging in with every email address you might have used to sign up.

If you tried all these steps and you still can’t unsubscribe, email the GSC Technology Officer and they will walk you through the steps.

Why does the GSC have three lists?

Up until 2000/2001, the GSC had one list but during the graduate student unionization controversy the council felt that it was appropriate to split political debates from bulleting board and events announcements. At the time, GSCOMM used to be the busiest of the three lists but today this is not true anymore.

How should I behave on the listservs?

There are certain guidelines (that date as far back as the creation of the Internet itself!) that help a polite and civilized exchange of email. They are usually know as netiquette. The links below should help you with this:

What happened to the attachment I sent?

As a general rule, the listservs do not accept email attachments. If you attach something to your message, the attachment will be stripped without warning. This rule is in place since the Brown email system has such a low quota for storage. People already run out of space in their mailboxes quite quickly because of the volume of plain-text messages sent to GSBB; imagine how much worse the problem would be if those emails could contain images too!

Instead of attaching files, please put them online somewhere — you might try flickr, picasa, Google docs, or craigslist. Then provide a link to the file instead.