Selecting a Preferred E-mail Address (PEA) when you are the member of a discussion list

If you are the member of a discussion list (e.g., LISTSERV) or the owner of a discussion list, the selection of a Preferred E-mail Address (PEA) will impact how your mail is handled with regard to those lists. Before you establish your PEA, please review the following and take appropriate action based upon which option best fits your situation.

Once you activate an email nickname, the e-mail router rewrites all mail headers sent from the account you have selected as your PEA to appear as if it came from the address nickname@louisville.edu. This will cause problems on closed lists (e.g., ones where a listowner must add you to the list membership) and may cause confusion on open lists. This happens because the list has you registered under the prior account name not nickname@louisville.edu. Typically this does not impact your ability to receive mail from the list but will prevent you from sending mail to the list. To prevent these problems, chose one of the following options:

If you are a member of a discussion group and have multiple computer accounts,you may want to use Option 1 and convert addresses on discussion groups later.
If you have only one computer account or you are a discussion group listowner, Option 2 is recommended.

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OPTION 1

1. For your PEA, select an account that is not a member of any discussion lists/listservs.
2. Decide what you want your nickname to be.
3. Proceed to the Selecting PEA and Nickname web form and complete those steps. Note: It takes approximately one hour for this change to become effective.
4. Select a or b
   a. Use the PEA account for general mail and messages and continue to use the other accounts for discussion list/listserv mail.
   OR
   b. Unsubscribe
   1 from the discussion lists
   2 from your non-PEA accounts and then re-subscribe to discussion lists from your PEA account.
   
   i. If the list is an open list, you can do this yourself.
   ii. If the list is a closed list, you will need to send a request to the listowner of the respective discussion list.
   
   With either item a or b, you can determine the timetable at which you wish to convert your address on discussion lists (if at all.)

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OPTION 2

1. Identify all the lists of which you are a member or an owner. (If you don t know what list you are a member- click here to find out.)
2. Decide what you want your nickname to be.
3. For those lists for which you are the owner/moderator of the list, send a message to the list administrator at the site on which the list is located.
   a. If the list is located at UofL, then send the message to Listserv Administrators indicating that you are selecting a PEA, what the PEA and nickname will be. Normally your list ownership will be changed to the new address (i.e., nickname@louisville.edu) by the next business day.
   b. If the list is not located at UofL, contact the administrator or postmaster at the site on which the list is located and indicate that your list owner address is changing and indicate the new address.
   Note: You may want to wait to do step 5 below dependent upon the amount of time it takes to get this change made at the remote site, especially if you are acting as moderator of the list or the list generates a significant number of errors to the list owner.
   
4. Unsubscribe from the discussion lists for which you are only a member (i.e., not owner or moderator.) DO THIS STEP BEFORE you select your PEA in step 5.
5. Proceed to the Selecting PEA and Nickname web form and complete those steps.
   Note: It takes approximately one hour for this change to become effective.
6. Re-subscribe to the discussion lists for which you are only a member from your PEA account.
   a. If the list is an open list, you can do this yourself.
   b. If the list is a closed list, you will need to send a request to the list owner of the respective discussion list.

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Unsubscribing From a List

1. If the list is located at UofL, send a mail message from the account from which you are unsubcribing to listserv@listserv.louisville.edu. The subject line of the mail message should be left blank. The first line of the text or message area of the mail message should be: UNSUB listname where listname is the name of the list from which you are unsubscribing
2. If the list is not located at UofL:
   a. If the list is managed by LISTSERV software, follow the same steps as for UofL, except send the message to LISTSERV@domain-name where domain-name is the domain name at which the listserv resides.
   b. If the list is not managed by LISTSERV or the list is one which requires that the owner handle removing members, send a message to the list owner requesting that he or she change your address or provide you with instructions on how to do so.

If these steps fail or you encounter difficulty, first try contacting the list owner for assistance. If the list owner does not respond or you encounter other difficulties, contact Listserv Administrators.

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Finding Out What Lists I'm On

If you don't remember on what lists you are a member (e.g., a low volume list, or one in which someone else subscribed you to the list), you can use the following steps to assist you.

1. Send a message to listserv@listserv.louisville.edu
   a. Leave the subject line blank
   b. Have the following command as the first line of the message text: QUERY *
   > Note this will only assist you for those lists which reside at UofL. If you are a member of lists not housed at UofL, you will either need to send mail to the postmaster at sites where you suspect you are a list member or wait until you get mail from that list and deal with it then (since typically, after selecting your PEA, only your ability to send mail to the list is impacted.) <ul>