About Our Mailing Lists

The NGO Resource Centre has more than 25 mailing lists that cover different topics of interest to the development community in Vietnam. You can access the mailing lists at http://www.ngocentre.org.vn/mailinglists. For a detailed manual on using the mailing lists, please go to the mailman user manual.

A mailing list is a list of email addresses for people interested in a given topic who want to share information or discuss the topic. Members are able to send an email, often called a post, to the list in order to have it distributed to other members. The NGO Resource Centre's mailing lists are moderated, so that spam, posts unrelated to the topic for that mailing list, and large file attachments are not distributed. Our policy is to reject all posts to mailing lists that are bigger than 500 kilobytes.

 

Joining and leaving a mailing list

 

Join a mailing list at http://www.ngocentre.org.vn/mailinglists. You can change your subscription options, including leaving the mailing list, by using the link at the bottom of each email post you receive from the mailing list. Or go to http://www.ngocentre.org.vn/mailinglists, click on the link to your mailing list, and then find the website button labelled "Unsubscribe or edit options". Also see the step-by-step User Guide to joining and leaving a mailing list at http://www.ngocentre.org.vn/node/16816.

 

Posting a message to a mailing list

 

To post a message simply send an email to the email address for the mailing list. Whenever possible, use plain text with no "html" formatting or attachments. Your post will not necessarily appear immediately as all posts are moderated and require approval before they are circulated to the mailing list.

Attachments can take up a great deal of memory in the inboxes of recipients of emails and can also be slow or impossible to download for those on a slow internet connection. If possible, use website links to the documents instead. If you must send an attachment, convert Microsoft Word documents into PDF documents to reduce their size - emails that are bigger than 500 kilobytes will be rejected. Another alternative is to send the email without the attachment, and offer to email it to the individuals who ask for a copy.

Or contact the NGO Resource Centre at [email protected] about the possibility of posting your documents on the NGO Resource Centre website. For example a report could be posted on the Publications section, or a workshop on the Events section of the website.

 

Mailing list reminder

 

Each month an email is sent to you reminding you of your subscription status and providing you with the option to change it. Or you can go to your mailing list page on the NGO Resource Centre website to make changes. Go to http://www.ngocentre.org.vn/mailinglists, click on th link for your mailing list, and then find the website button labelled "Unsubscribe or edit options".

 

Mailing list archives

 

You can browse through previous posts. Go to http://www.ngocentre.org.vn/mailinglists, click on the link to your list, then click on the link to Archives.

 

If you are going on holiday

 

If you are going on holiday for some time, it's best to disable your subscription to the mailing list, as any automated "I am on leave" message from your email address will be sent to the list - and every member of the list - every time a message is posted.

 

Mailing List Etiquette

  • Emails must be relevant to the theme of the mailing list.
  • Mailing lists are for group conversations. Refrain from conducting one-to-one conversations. For example if you don't have a new contribution to make but simply want to express agreement with what has been posted, do so in a private email to the poster. Each email you post is sent to everyone on the mailing list, which often comprises hundreds of people.
  • Emails should always be polite, and any critiques or reviews of previous emails should be constructive. Do not use a mailing list for sarcasm, defamatory remarks, personal attacks and other negative responses. In general, take a disagreement with another user off the mailing list, and communicate with him or her via personal email.
  • Do not post inflammatory, or "flame", emails to any mailing list.
  • Never forward an email you haven't read, or send someone an attachment you haven't examined. The email or attachment may contain information that should not have been forwarded - or it may already have been circulated to the mailing list.
  • Do not send information from for-profit companies.
  • No matter how worthy the cause, do not email requests for donations or grants to a mailing list.
  • Always start a reply to an email at the top of the email rather than the bottom, so that members can easily review your contribution to the conversation.
  • If you wish to create a "thread", or dialogue, on a new topic, create a new email rather than replying to a previous email from the mailing list and paste the mailing list address in the address bar.
  • Use a meaningful subject line. Many people use this to decide which posts to read and which to ignore. If you're replying to a message and the topic of your reply is drifting from the original subject, then edit the subject line.
  • Do not post just a link in your message - give some information regarding what the link is about. Subscribers will want to know whether it is something that they should read.
  • Please edit your post, as a very long thread with unnecessary information is unnecessarily time-consuming for other subscribers and also takes up more bandwidth. Include only enough information from previous posts so that people who may not have been following the thread closely will be able to determine what you're talking about. However, always leave in the names of authors of previous comments that you have retained.
  • People accessing your email use computers of all eras and many technical environments. Some systems will not handle large emails or attachments. Our policy is to reject all posts to mailing lists that are bigger than 500 kilobytes.