On The Use Of Multiple Company Mailing Lists

DippyOz asks: "We have a debate raging at work about mailing lists that I hope the Slashdot community can shed some light on. I would like to have three or four internal mailing lists with each having a very focused topic and rules. Our staff can join whichever lists they feel they need to join to do their daily jobs. Our IT manager is against this, preferring the one general mailing list to which all staff subscribe. No list will have very high traffic, as they will mostly be used for company and software announcements. Which would be better?" Although this is highly subjective, I think this is an interesting question. Could those of you who work in companies that use mailing lists comment on what has and hasn't worked for your offices?

Comments

Must be a small office....

[Hackboy]

Last place I worked we had over a hundred mailing lists and only around 200 employees. Admittedly, many were for use by users of the website, but there was almost always a list for each project going on (and usually two or three.)

The worst part was the admin work dealing with these lists. When the first few lists were set up, no one had any idea how fast the number of lists would grow. Only the sysadmins could create/make changes to the lists and there were no automated tools to add new employees to the correct lists, remove terminated employees, etc. Lots of time wasted by the admins when they could have been doing things to make everyone's lives easier.

So my suggestion to your IT director would be to set something up like MajorCool where the users can create and manage their own lists. Even if you only need one today, you're gonna need more tomorrow. 'cause someday HR is gonna figure out that they really don't want contractors seeing mail about benefits that is sent to the everyone list and demand another one. And it just gets worse from there.

Multiple...

[davidu]

I think a good system is too have multiple.

For a tech company for instance:

tech@ (coders, engrs, peeps interested in tech) (informal)

engr@ (all engrs, formal)

staff@ (everyone, informal)

employee@ (everyone, moderated, formal)

mrkt@ (informal, anyone into marketing info)

mrkt-staff@ (formal, all marketing)

.... you get the picture.

It makes it easy to sift though a lot of mail. Nothing critical would be on an informal list and could be deleted if needed. But, it leaves a place for important messages that must be read.


-Davidu