Participating Through Email

Why Participate by Email?
Selecting a Mailing List Format
Subscribing to Conference Mailing Lists
Reading Messages
Downloading File Attachments
Posting a Reply Message
Posting a Topic Message
Finding the Email Address for a Conference
What am I Missing?

Why Participate by Email?

The benefits of email participation are numerous. Here are just a few:

• You don’t have to remember to visit the WebBoard site. Busy people often find it hard to check WebBoard for new messages. By receiving all messages in email, you don’t have to worry. You automatically know what is happening.
  
• You can save on connect time. If you are working remotely from a home office or while traveling, you can pick up WebBoard messages when you pick up your other email. You can craft your replies offline and have them posted when you send your email.
  
• You can immediately know when messages are posted to important conferences. Since mailing lists are on a per-conference basis, you can subscribe to the conferences that most affect you. Then you receive messages as they are posted and don’t have to constantly check the board for new ones. You may still decide to go to the board to read and reply, but you know there is something waiting for you.
  
• Unlike with regular email, you don’t have to keep all messages on your local system (although you can). Instead, to refer back to a previous email, use your browser to go to the board with the conference and review the messages there (neatly organized and easily searched).

Selecting a Mailing List Format

You can receive WebBoard messages by email in one of three formats:

Non-digest

This format sends individual messages as they are posted. This format is best if you want to participate in conferences on a real-time basis by reading and responding to messages as they are posted.

Digest

This format saves all the messages from a conference for a day and sends them in a single email message. The digest email starts with an index list of all messages in the email so you can get a quick overview of what happened. This format is best if you want to primarily read the discussion and only respond occasionally.

Digest/ZIPped

This format creates a digest and then compresses it into a standard ZIP file, which is sent once a day as a file attachment. You must be using a mail program that handles attachments and have an unZIP program (such as WinZip) to open the file. This format is useful if the conferences have high volume and you want to get the messages as compactly as possible. This format is also useful if you simply want to archive conference postings.

The format you select for the mailing list is set in your user profile and is applied across all conferences. If you want or need a different format for different conferences, you should set up multiple user accounts (see “What if you want more than one mailing list format?” below). After selecting a format, you must subscribe to mailing lists before you will receive any postings by email.

To verify or change your mailing list format, you edit your user profile. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Click Options on the WebBoard menubar. The Options menu appears.
   
2. Click Edit Your Profile from the menu. The User Profile page appears.
   
3. Scroll to the end of this page and select your preferred mailing list format by clicking the radio button next to it.
   
4. Click Save to update your profile.

Subscribing to Conference Mailing Lists

Note that some conferences may not have mailing lists; setting up mailing lists is the choice of the WebBoard administrator, board manager, or conference moderator. If a conference does not have a mailing list, and you would like to receive email for that conference, contact the WebBoard administrator.

To subscribe to one or more conference mailing lists, follow these steps:

1. Click Options on the WebBoard menubar. The Options menu appears.
   
2. Click Mailing Lists from the menu. The Mailing Lists page appears.
   
3. Check the box next to the conference name to subscribe to its mailing list. Repeat for each conference you want to subscribe to. The name of the mailing list is in parentheses following the Conference name.
   
4. To unsubscribe from a mailing list, uncheck the box.
   
5. Click Save to complete the subscription process. You will now start receiving email from the conferences you selected.

Note To send email to WebBoard, the email address you put in your WebBoard user profile must exactly match the Reply-To email address used by your email program. If these addresses don’t match, WebBoard will not let you post messages via email. The Reply-To address is sometimes called the Return Address.

Once you subscribe to a mailing list, you will start receiving messages posted to the conference for that list by email. In non-digest format, the messages start arriving within seconds after being posted to the board. With digest or digest/ZIPped format, you will receive an email once a day containing all messages posted in the last 24 hours. The WebBoard administrator sets the time at which digests are sent out. You read these messages just as you would any other email.

Non-digest and digest messages appear in your inbox generally from the conference listmanager for the mailing list at the WebBoard site, which includes the domain name of the WebBoard server. For example, that name may be something like “Agendas Listmanager” <listmanager@www.conferences.com> or “Updates Listmanager” <listmanager@forums. webboard.com>. The list name, Agendas and Updates in the previous examples, is not always the same as the conference name. The list name appears in the conference profile.

A non-digest message includes the address information and the message body. On the other hand, a digest message begins with a list of the messages by topic and poster, followed by the individual messages or an attached ZIP file containing the messages.

Downloading File Attachments

A file attachment posted with a message is included in the email version of that message as a link or an attachment. To download the file, click the link in the email message. You must be connected to the Internet to download the file.

Posting a Reply Message

Replying to a WebBoard message is the same as replying to any other email you receive. Depending on the format in which you receive WebBoard email, the procedures differ slightly, as described below.

Non-digest format

Reply to the message using your email program’s normal methods. For example, if you use Eudora, click Reply or select Reply from the Message menu.

Digest format

Reply to individual messages in the digest by clicking the Reply To link at the end of the message. This link is a mailto link that lets you send a reply to WebBoard for that message. Do not reply to the digest itself since that email can’t be posted to the conference.

Digest/ZIPped format

The ZIPped file contains a text version of all messages posted to the conference. The only way to respond to these messages is to cut and paste the correct Reply-To address into your mail program and craft a reply. If you want the archiving convenience of ZIPped files and the ability to respond to messages easily, we recommend you set up two accounts with two different formats.

WebBoard knows which message you are responding to by the conference name and message number assigned to it. For example, the Reply-To field of the message says:

Reply-To: "homework" <bio100hmwrk.2979@bot.srcc.com>

The Homework conference uses bio100hmwrk as its mailing list name, and WebBoard assigned 2979 to the current message. The domain name completes the routing back to the correct WebBoard site.

Once you send the reply, the message is posted to the appropriate conference as a response (that is, it is indented under the message to which you were responding). Each message posted to WebBoard from a mailing list is identified by a postage icon in the top-right corner.

Posting a Topic Message

You can also post new topic messages to a WebBoard conference through email. You may be reading a message and decide that you want to provide more information to the conference, but that information doesn’t directly respond to the current message. There are several ways to post a new topic, but the concept is the same.

The preceding section noted that the Reply-To field of a WebBoard message contained a number. The number identifies a specific message. By replying to a message without including the number, you post a new topic. For example, to start a new topic in the Bio100 Homework conference, the address in your email would be:

bio100hmwrk@bot.srcc.com

The subject of your email message becomes the new topic in the conference list.

If you are using non-digest format, and your email program supports hyperlinks, starting a new topic is easy. Simply click the link in the email’s footer for starting a new topic. You can also start a new topic by sending a message to the conference mailing list address (see “Finding the Email Address for a Conference” below).

What am I Missing?

The following WebBoard features are not available through email:

• Editing messages or viewing changes to posted messages
  
• Deleting messages
  
• Seeing that a new conference has been created
  
• Searching user databases
  
• Searching message databases
  
• Creating a new user account
  
• Editing your user profile
  
• Administrative, management, or moderator privileges
  
  

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