Graduate Student Council of Brown University

Please note: you will only be able to join the listserv if you provide a valid @brown.edu email address. After the initial sign up, you can then change to a preferred address

Listservs are email lists that go out to lots of people. The GSC has set up 3 listservs for the graduate student community.

• GSNOTICE is a listserv for event announcements only, and these events generally must be Brown affiliated in some sort of official capacity.
• 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.
• 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, you should choose the listserv you think is best appropriate for your post. If you cannot decide, email the GSC Technology Officer.

You will only be able to join the listserv if you provide your First and Last name and a valid @brown.edu email address (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). This is a new security measure in order to minimize the amount of spam email. Previous list subscribers will not be affected from this change. 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. Posting to the list is for members only and when you join the list you will get a confirmation email. Depending on which listserv you want to join or leave, go to one of the following pages:

gsnotice-l (low traffic)
gsbb-l (medium traffic)
gscomm-l (high traffic)

When you sign up to any of the lists, automatically you will be eligible to post to the other two lists. Posts sent to GSNOTICE-L are also sent to GSBB-L and GSCOMM-L, and posts sent to GSBB-L are also sent to GSCOMM-L but if you elect to receive digests things are different, read below.

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 (above), and click the leave button. If that does not work, visit all three pages above in turn, and try to unsubscribe from all three lists. Most likely you forgot which list you were really subscribed to. Also, try to unsubscribe using all of your email addresses (your Brown address, your department's address, your hotmail address, etc.) . It is possible that the list knows you under a different address than you think it does, especially if you have forwarding installed between addresses.

If you tried all this and it did not work, email the GSC Technology Officer and he will walk you through the steps.

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.

GSNOTICE is a super list and gets sent to GSCOMM and GSBB. GSBB is also a superlist but only of GSCOMM, therefore any mail sent to GSBB goes to GSCOMM too. Duplicates are erased so don't worry about clogging your inbox. Regardless of which listserv you are sign up to, you are eligible to post in any of the three lists we have. Note, digest behaves differently for super-lists and only applies for the list you are truly a member of. Read below for more details.

In short, if you want to receive every message that is posted (political and non political), you should sign up to GSCOMM. If you do not want to receive political emails but just bulletin board type messages and major announcements, sign up for GSBB. Finally, if you do not want to get political nor bulleting board type emails, and just want to be notified of major events for graduate students, sign up for GSNOTICE only.

Send an email to
gsnotice-l@listserv.brown.edu,
gsbb-l@listserv.brown.edu, or
gscomm-l@listserv.brown.edu
depending on which list your message should go to.

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:

• RFC 1855 - Netiquette Guidelines (this is the official document that is as old as the Internet itself)
• Netiquette homepage
• User Guidelines and Netiquette
• Online Netiquette

Please refrain from sending attachments whenever possible because this is impolite to other users; in particular the mailling list does not handle them well when sending digest. If possible, please proivde a link to the file instead. There are many places on the Internet that provide free web hosting.

If, for some reason, you feel that you must attach a file, please realize that there are limits to the size that is allowed. Currently, these are 20KB for GSCOMM and 100KB for GSBB and are subject to change. Moreover, certain types of files are not permitted on the mailling list.

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. Unfortunately, digests do not span lists. That is, the digest of GSCOMM 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 (though digesting GSNOTICE is probably not worth it since it is low-traffic).