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Some love 'em, some hate 'em by George Spain CCIT Technical Writer While it's true that a broadcast e-mail message is the easiest way to spread the word around the MUSC campus, it's far from universal and in some cases, it's downright unpopular.   Dawnette Hurley, CCIT administrative assistant, and the person behind the curtain, said that about 5,300 people a day receive broadcast e-mail messages. Anyone with an e-mail account is allowed to subscribe or unsubscribe from the broadcast message list (See below).    Hurley said that while most requests pose no problem and are included in the single daily mailing, there's always a few that want to sell dogs, cats, uniforms or something that “has no relationship to MUSC.” These messages are rejected with a polite notice. Also, one bite of the apple is usually all you get. “Some have requested that we include the same message everyday until the event occurs. As a rule, we don't do this,” she said. Ordinary broadcast messages are bundled into groups of five or six and sent out once a day.   And, yes, like everywhere else, rank has it privileges for high priority messages. VIP messages sometimes get sent out by themselves, even if this means sending more than one broadcast message a day. Are you in or out? Reaching 5,300 a day has obvious advantages, but MUSC has more than 13,000 (including GroupWise, Mulberry, Netscape Communicator, etc.) e-mail addresses, said Nickie Kopacka, academic e-mail administrator for CCIT. So who's not getting the message?   Students, for one (there are about 2,400 of them), are not included in broadcast messages, unless they have subscribed. Plus, “some people just hate the things,” Kopacka said. She said that initially about 500 chose to opt out when they converted from QuickMail and GroupWise e-mail to IMAP (Netscape Communicator, Mulberry, and Pine) programs. She said she gets two or three requests a month to be deleted from the list that Hurley uses to send out the messages. Kopacka said that she gets many more requests from people who want to join.   That still leaves a lot of people who don't get broadcast messages. Why?   “For the most part, it's because they just don't know they can get them,” said Kopacka. “That's what we're trying to do, get the word out.” Also, some people just don't have access to individual e-mail accounts.  Mandatory or prohibited? Even so, because of the potential of broadcast messages to reach the majority of MUSC personnel, some have discussed the idea of making broadcast message delivery mandatory. To complicate matters further, others have suggested prohibiting them because they can jam ClinLAN e-mail gateways and slow mail delivery.   What should we make of these opposing views? Mike Coffman, systems administrator manager at CCIT, takes a more moderate view.   “Right now there aren't enough problems with broadcast messages to make any sweeping changes. Some administrators want to be able to communicate with everyone (in times of emergency and outages) and we have a way to do this if the request originates from the highest levels,” Coffman said. How you can be in and out at the same time There are a couple of middle-of-the-road solutions that take advantage of the new features in the IMAP mail system. In broad terms, these fall into one of two categories: Mailing Lists and Shared Folders.   The mailing list strategy is simple. Instead of sending a message to 6,000 people, you can create a targeted mailing list that singles out different groups for different messages. Targeting special segments of the MUSC population would increase the number but reduce the size of the broadcast messages and give recipients the ability to opt in or out of a particular list. The main problem with this approach is that there is presently no easy way to choose people by groups (except students). For that to become a reality, you'll have to wait on the completion of the Medical University Master People Index (MUMPI).  Sharing is the way of the future The shared folder concept is a little trickier to set up (and at present, is not available to GroupWise users), but offers a number of advantages including a way to drastically reduce the broadcast message volume while at the same time increasing the potential number of recipients.    The easiest way to understand this concept is to imagine a post office with about 1,000 post office boxes. You could send out a mass mailer that would be delivered to each of the 1,000 boxes or you could write that same message on a bulletin board in the post office lobby. The 1,000 still have to come to pick up their mail, but they would read the single bulletin board message if they chose.   The way the shared folder concept works is that everyone with an IMAP account would see, in addition to their own subfolders or mailboxes (like sent-mail and read-mail), an additional mailbox (called user.musc.lists.musc-broadcast) In this mailbox would be the broadcast messages. Because this is a folder shared by everyone with an IMAP account, there would only have to be one copy of the message. Therefore, broadcast messages could be archived for 30 days without taking up any significant space.   Even better, because the folder is not associated with your account, any messages in there would not count against your “quota.” It's an ideal way to store common information without using valuable server space. For help with setting up shared mailboxes, contact Nickie Kopacka at 792-4031.   How to do it  How to receive or quit receiving broadcast messages: To join the list send a message to majordomo@musc.edu. Leave the subject blank. In the body of the message, type only  “subscribe musc-broadcast” (do not use the quote marks).   To quit getting messages from the list, send a message to majordomo@musc.edu. Leave the subject blank. In the body of the message, type only “unsubscribe musc-broadcast” (do not use the quote marks). How to submit a message to the broadcast list: To submit a message for inclusion, send an e-mail message that includes your name, department, and your phone number along with your message text to broadcast@musc.edu. Please don't send any attachments; they won't work and could cause trouble.   All of this and more can be found at the following important website: <http://www.musc.edu/ccit/majordomo/broadcast.html#send>.