UH Groupings and LISTSERV Considerations

Owned by Julio Polo
Last updated: Oct 15, 2021 by mhodges
2 min read

UH Groupings cannot stop a person from leaving a mailing list

If your grouping synchronizes with a LISTSERV mailing list, you should be aware that UH Groupings cannot prevent a person from using a LISTSERV command to leave the mailing list for your grouping.

When that happens, the person who left the LISTSERV mailing list is still a member of the grouping, and you will be notified* of this discrepancy.   You would then have two options to consider:

1) Agree with the person's departure, and go to hawaii.edu/uhgroupings to exclude the person from the grouping.  This is so that the grouping and mailing list are in sync.

2) Contact the person who left and convince the person to stay.   If the person agrees to stay, follow the procedures for putting the person back into the listserv list:

Putting a person back into the LISTSERV list
This procedure applies only when a person is in a grouping by way of the automated basis, but the person signs off the LISTSERV list.  You can put the person back in the LISTSERV list by doing this (person is already in the grouping):
  • Go to hawaii.edu/uhgroupings
  • Exclude the person from the grouping
  • Wait at least 2 minutes
  • Remove the person from the exclude list

*All grouping owners will receive email once a week regarding any discrepancies.  The email will come from its-iam-help@lists.hawaii.edu and the subject line will be "People have left the mailing list for your grouping: name-of-your-grouping-here"

What is the purpose of your grouping?

Let's say you are thinking of creating a grouping to define a particular population (e.g. all the staff in my department) and you plan to use this grouping for two purposes:

  1. Define the population allowed to do something (e.g. all the staff in my department, and all of them need to be allowed to use my application)
  2. Send email to this population

In such situations, we recommend that you create two separate but related groupings:

  • One grouping for authorization (e.g. my-application-users grouping whose basis is all staff in my department)
  • Another grouping for sending email which uses the above grouping as its basis (e.g. my-application-email-updates uses my-application-users as its basis, but it can include/exclude people from getting email without affecting my-application-users)

If you are only interested in email, it is perfectly fine to create just one grouping. 

UH Groupings automatically updates a mailing list based on your criteria

By using a grouping, you'll be taking advantage of the automated population data available in UH Groupings. Your mailing list will automatically be updated when a person is hired or a person leaves. It sure beats having to manually figure out who fits your criteria (ask HR for a list of people in my department?), having to individually add them, remembering to add a new person, and often forgetting to delete a person who has left years ago.