Version: $Revision: 1.14 $Last Modified: $Date: 2007/04/01 23:02:34 $ GMT
First established September, 2006
This site, lists.shepard-families, is an unofficial site for maintaining email lists for use of families of students or staff of Shepard Elementary School (district site or Shepard's own site) in Plano, Texas.
The site was set up after the Shepard PTA decided to distribute the Spirit Newsletter by email in 2006. However, the Spirit Newsletter in no more. It has been replaced by the Shepard Spotlight which is produced and distributed by the Shepard staff and does not use an email list here. However, this site may be useful for other mailing lists people may want to establish.
For discussion of how to make the best use of this resource (especially since the Spirit Newsletter for which it was set up is defunct) there is the About list. If you have any interest in this set, please join that list.
In this section we will use the "about" list as an example. The instructions are the (almost) identical for all lists.
If you wish to participate in the discussion on the "About" list you must first be a member (subscribed to) the About emailing list. In order to make sure that only correct email addresses get added to the list, you must respond to a confirmation request email. But that is a later step.
There are three ways to initiate the subscription process. You may use any one of them.
invitationmessage from the mailing list management system
invitations. Invitations may be sent for any number of reasons depending on the particular list. The invitation message isn't enough though: You must follow the instructions in the invitation letter to be added to the list.
Once you get the confirmation request (or invitation) you need to follow the instructions within that email. There will be two options. You can either simply reply to the confirmation request. That's it, just reply and send. The other option is to follow the web link within the message. The confirmation step is the only way to ensure that the actual human (that's you) who gets mail at the subscribed address actually wants to be on the list.
Once you have confirmed, you will get an automatic Welcome to the
message. Save that message for future
reference. It will also contain a low security
password which you can use to manage your list
subscriptions. If you don't get the welcome message then you are not on
the list. If you have trouble joining the list, please contact the list
administrators for help. About
mailing list
This site, lists.shepard-families.org, was set up at first to host the Spirit Newsletter distribution list. However, the Spirit has been replaced by the Shepard Spotlight which is not distributed by email. So the original purpose of this site is no more.
But there are some experimental lists, and if this system works out, we can easily add other lists both for announcements and discussion. You can subscribe to other lists in the same way that you join the Spirit list, but some lists may have different policies about who can join them.
For discussion of what other lists we should add or general discussion of this service and list policies. So Please join the About list for discussion.
There is a list for the Board of the Shepard PTA. Membership in this list is restricted to PTA Board members. You may subscribe to the list in the usual manner, but will not be added to the list until the list administrator or the PTA President approves the membership.
The following links will be useful to members and to list administrators.
This site is not an official site of anything. It is set up on behalf of the Shepard PTA, but it is not an official PTA site. It is meant to complement – not replace – the district's site about Shepard nor Shepard's own site.
Also the lists here are separate from the eNews mailing lists run by the Plano Independent School District. It would have been nice to have a one stop shop for all of the mailing lists, but by keeping this separate it gives us more flexibility to establish the lists that we in the Shepard community see fit.
This site is currently run and maintained by Jeffrey Goldberg who has a daughter at Shepard.
As noted above, this is actually a privately run web site and email service run by Jeffrey Goldberg, however in future it may be transferred to the Shepard PTA. I, Jeffrey Goldberg, have been involved in fighting various forms of email abuse since 1996. Both I and the PTA understand that when you sign up for a particular list for a particular purpose that you are giving consent for that purpose only. Nothing will happen with your email address without your explicit consent.
At the moment the only list being run is the one for the Spirit Newsletter which will be used only for sending the newsletter. In the future other lists may be added, and again, nobody will be added to a list without their confirmed consent. Some future lists may be open discussion lists for which any list member may post. I may, in extreme cases, engage in some censorship, but even so the responsibility for what gets posted belongs to the person who posted it.
Currently the machines that the system is running on are in my home office. They are on a battery backup system, and are rarely off. But don't, at this point, expect complete reliability. I maintain levels of host and network security that I believe are exceptionally high for a small office running public servers, but again I can't guaranty anything.
One can't blame AOL for having a very aggressive mail blocking and filtering policy. They need to. Unfortunately, they often implement this by simply dropping the mail instead of issuing a proper failure. This means that even the list administrator has no idea of how many or which aol.com addresses failed.
This, of course, isn't just a problem with AOL, though it is more extreme with them. Please add lists.shepard-families.org to any white-list your system may offer. AOL requires that such listed sites meet certain conditions, and we have done everything we can to meet those.
This mailing list management system treats the user passwords in a very low security manner. In particular, passwords get sent around by plain old ordinary (unencrypted) email. Unencrypted email should be thought of as sending a message by postcard. This means that the password that you use on this system should not be the same or similar to a password that you use for anything more important. Someone who gets a hold of your mailing list password should not be able to use it to guess any of your other passwords.
The system will happily generate a good password for you if you don't specify one or change it yourself. And it is perfectly fine to keep the one that the system generates for you.
Of course it is impossible to remember the scores of passwords we all have to use, especially if some of them are used infrequently. For the mailing list passwords, you could just save the email message you received when you joined the list or save the monthly password reminders in your email. But a more general solution (that goes well beyond this and other mailing list servers) is to use a password management system. A password management system will require that you memorize one high quality master password. And with that you will be able to very conveniently get the particular usernames and passwords you need at any given moment. Once you get used to using a proper password management, you will wonder how you ever managed without one.
For users of Microsoft operating systems (Windows, XP, Vista, etc), I recommend Password Safe. PasswordSafe is an Open Source project from extremely competent and trustworthy developers. For Macintosh OS X users, I would recommend 1Password. Although it is not Open Source, its security infrastructure uses Apple's Keychain (which is Open Source). 1Password is provides an ease of use along with web browser plug ins to make an outstanding password management system. If you insist on Open Source for password management (to ensure against the possibility of back doors), then you may use the Keychain directly, or use Password Gorilla. For users of other Unix-like systems (Linux, BSD, etc) you are probably well-informed enough that you are already using some password management system. Also web browsers such as Firefox and Opera (I don't know about IE) have password management systems as well.
My concern is to get the emailing system up and tested first. Making this web site look vaguely modern is a lower priority. More information will follow someday, and with luck this information will all be better structured.
At the moment we are looking at sending out the Spirit Newsletter in Portable Document Format (PDF) which can be read by any PDF viewer including Adobe's Acrobat Reader.
There are at least three different newsletters that go to families of Shepard students. It's very easy to get them confused. The Shepard Spotlight is produced quarterly by the Shepard Staff. It replaces the now defunct Spirit Newsletter
As made clear (I hope) in the section on joining lists, once the subscription (or change of email address) process is initiated, a confirmation request is sent to the new email address. The people (that's you) reading mail at that address must act on the confirmation request before the address really added to the distribution list.
Confirming isn't hard. In 99.44 percent of the cases, simply hitting
reply
and then send
is all that is needed. But still, many
people seem to get stuck on this step. This section is to describe why
we need to go through the confirmation. If you already know or don't
care, there is no reason to read this section.
Having a person act on an email delivered to the new address is the only way to ensure that the person who receives mail at that address wants to get the mail. One might think that initially signing up on the website or signing the paper form to join the list would be enough. It's not. Consider a few cases. The first case involves a typographical error. It is easy for an incorrect email address to be entered. It happens all of the time. Now consider things from the point of view of the person who happens to get that mail. Chances are they will have never heard of Shepard. They will start getting bulk mail which they never signed up for. Even though it would be the result of an honest mistake, we can't expect the recipient of the unwanted bulk mail to believe that.
Now let's consider a another example. Suppose someone maliciously added other people's addresses to the list through the website. This really and truly does happen. Suppose someone came to the website and tried to add 5000 addresses (not their own) to the list. With the confirmation process the worst that would happen is 5000 people would get unwanted confirmation requests. But without the confirmation process, 5000 people would be subscribed to a list that they have no knowledge of. At best, this would result in lots of Internet providers blacklisting lists.shepard-families.org. At worst, it would have the site (and worse, me!) kicked off the net. And yes, this kind of malicious mass subscription does happen, particularly if the owner of the site has made enemies among spammers.
Version: $Revision: 1.14 $