Email lists or bulk email accounts are an excellent method of communication in our age of information.
When one office needs to send a message or an announcement to other offices, or when an administrator/principal wants to communicate will all members of the staff of their respective organization or department sending one message that is delivered to many recipients is both easy and efficient.
As the times have changed and the internet and email have developed and become part of our daily existence so too must the security measures employed to protect the Archdiocese and the members of the email lists that reside on the Archdiocesan email server.
The current policy of the Archdiocese for bulk email accounts is that any person inside or external to the Archdiocese network is free to send emails to our lists. This open policy provides great freedom and ease of use and administration of the bulk email lists.
Unfortunately, a recent event changed our attitude regarding the open policy of posting to bulk accounts. Two weeks past an outside entity sent an inappropriate email to one of our lists.
The widespread discomfort caused by the abuse of an external spammer, and the disbelief that a “private” email list housed by the Archdiocesan email server could be abused in such a manner has resulted in a change of policy.
Additional advice from users has revealed that vendors and other external entities have used our lists indiscriminately.
The current open policy of posting to email lists will be terminated in the near future.
The new policy remains to be worked out. However, lists will be one of 3 types:
- Moderated - Only the moderator can post to the list - any email sent to the list is reviewed by the moderator who then decides if the email is posted to the list
- Subscribers - Only subscribers can post to the list - this means that any member of the list can post to the list. This is a cumbersome and inefficient method as many of us belong to more than one list and receive the same email repeatedly when the email is directed to lists such as allschools, alloffices, parishes, etc…
- Posting list - Only members of the posting list for each individual list will be able to post to the respective list - this is an effective method to reduce email redundancy but requires more administration from the respective lists members, departments and organizations (as well as the Internet Service Department) who use the lists. In this type of list, each department would assign a person or a group of people as posters for their respective department/organization.