** Preface ** Dear member, You are reading the "knowledge transfer" file for all mail-related things in AEGEE. The information here reflects the principles I observed during the three years running AEGEEserv, as well the established procedures for communicating with the members. It would be naive to think that someone is going to follow them, without understanding why things run in that way. I will try to motivate my approaches with the hope to inspire you, or even to let you improve them. I hope you will enjoy not only reading the file to its end, but also the time when you work for AEGEE. As for myself, back in 2004 when I entered the board of AEGEE-Karlsruhe I started receiving the mails for office@aegee.org . Some of them contained advertisements, with the remark "click here to get removed". For some weeks I clicked those links, until office@aegee.org was overspammed. Then I asked Stephan Roemer, my forerunner for the password on the server in order to filter mails containing "enlargement" or "rolex". That's how I got involved and some months later took over the whole server. It took me several months reading, reading and reading until I understood how to manage a server, how to adjust sendmail, to instal filters. In autumn 2004 I managed to install virus scanner. It was configured in such a way that everybody who was supposed to receive a virus received a mail with the text "You have sent a virus" and this caused panic among some members. Later on I managed to configure a spam filter, to find out that the server has no capacity for this task. So in Spring 2005 a brand new server arrived at home. I managed quite fast to deassemble it irreversibly, on of the processors pins was buckled. Then I bought pincer and repaired the processor. Installing Linux from Scratch took me some months, but even in 2008 the server works with it. With this server a spam filter was installed, the public mailing lists were configured to reject spam and this worked fine until the server rating went down due black scatters. ** History ** Aegeeserv is installed since approximately May 1997 and using Listserv rungs mailing lists. ** Mail *** *** Mailing Lists *** ===GENERAL LISTS === ====AEGEE-L==== AEGEE-L is the mother of all mailing lists, the first AEGEE mailing list, which was used initially for all kind of coordination. During the years many things evolved. Most importantly, now there isn't a single mailing list for everything possible. And during the application for AGORA or EBM members get invited to subscribe AEGEE-L. The latter ensures the constantly high amount of subscribers (over 1000). However people subscribe the list in order to get information about AEGEE and everything else, primary event announcement and political discussions, is in contrast to the expecations the members had, when they subscribed AEGEE-L. In consequence they unsubscribe and once we want to talk about AEGEE, the subscribers on AEGEE-L have left. Final Notes