CUCBC Mailing List Guidelines and Etiquette

CUCBC maintains several public email lists, which are outlined in full here. The most important lists are Contacts, Coxes and Captains. The purpose of this document is to outline what each of the lists should be used for, and general netiquette that users are expected to observe.

Failure to adhere to these guidelines may result in your email being rejected.

All of the email lists are moderated - your email will have to be approved before it is sent round the list.

List Purposes and Guidelines

Contacts

Contacts is the largest CUCBC mailing list with approximately 500 users subscribed. It has a variety of users including college rowers, town club rowers, and members of the public. It is intended for anyone who has an interest in Cambridge college rowing.

  • Contacts should be used when your email is relevance to the general rowing community. For example, flag updates are sent to contacts.
  • It is a medium volume list.
  • Be aware of how many people are subscribed to contacts. It's a lot of people to annoy if your email is perceived as spam.
  • Plugs for rowing related events e.g. races, college boatclub cocktails etc are ok. Useful adverts for stuff e.g. boats, ergos, equipment etc are also ok. If this gets out of hand/abused, then this guideline will be changed.

Captains

All college boat club captains are subscribed to this list, as the name suggests.

  • Email sent to the captains list should be directly relevant to boatclub captains. If you're just trying to send an email to everyone in the rowing community, use contacts. Do not send it to contacts and captains, as all captains should be subscribed to contacts as well.
  • It is intended to be low volume. CUCBC understands the substantial amount of email that boatclub captains receive, and by keeping the list low volume, important emails sent to the Captains list are more likely to be read and not discarded as rowing spam.
  • Adverts and social event plugs should not be sent to captains. Use banter or contacts instead.
  • Plugs for races are ok

Committee

The committee email list sends email to all members of the CUCBC Exec. For general enquiries, your first point of contact should be the CUCBC Secretary, who can be reached with the address: cucbc[AT]cucbc.org who will then forward it to the committee email list if necessary.

Etiquette

The golden rule of posting to email lists is "Think before you post". If what you intend to post will not make a positive contribution to the group and be of interest to several readers, do not post it.

You are advised to be aware of the RFC1855: Netiquette Guidelines, which is a standard set of guidelines for sending and receiving email.

In particular:

  • Do not hit Reply All, unless you intend to send your reply to the entire list.
  • Do not flame people, or reply to flames. Just ignore it.
  • Send email in plain text, not HTML. Use _underscores_ for italics, *asterisks* for emphasis, and CAPITALS for heavy emphasis.
  • Use askerisks * or hyphens - as bullet points if needed.
  • Lines should break at 72 characters (most email clients do this automatically for you).
  • Do not send 'unsubscribe me' requests to the main list address. Send it to webmaster[at]cucbc.org

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