Want to send an email to the whole of the King’s undergraduate student body? You can, but please read these guidelines first! They follow from the basic principle of being considerate when sending emails to about 400 people.
The Lists
[KCSU Announce] – This list is used only by the KCSU Exec to send out important announcements to undergraduates.
[KCSU Info] – The KCSU Info list is available to all students who want to send out information or announcements to the student body. Emails to this list are moderated by the KCSU Coordinator. Guidelines on what sort of emails you can send, and how often, are below.
If you ever want to unsubscribe from either of these lists, there is a link at the bottom of each KCSU Announce/KCSU Info email.
[KCSU Grads] – Emails to this list reach the whole of the graduate student body. If you are advertising a society event or similar, you should email the grads as well as the undergrads – otherwise they’ll feel left out! The guidelines for emailing King’s grads are the same as the KCSU Info ones below, as these two lists are generally used together.
Tip – Need to publicise something to the fellows? Email Jenny Malpass, the Vice Provost’s secretary, to get access to the fellows list.
Guidelines for KCSU Info
Emails sent to KCSU Info should be useful to all of the undergraduate body, and should be kept short and to the point.
- Only use your @cam.ac.uk address for posting to the list. Posting from your Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo/whatever will send moderators a notification requiring them to manually approve your submission. This requires them to determine if you are a King’s student or not which is both unnecessary work for them and an unnecessary delay for you. Those posting from non-cam addresses may be asked to re-send their email from their cam address.
- Large attachments are not allowed. Email attachments should be less than 512 KB (including your message). Make sure your attachments are free of viruses. Post links to websites whenever possible rather than including big attachments.
Political campaigns – you are permitted to advertise events of a political nature in which you or other King’s members are involved (protests, debates, etc.) but you may not directly campaign over the list. ‘Come and support us at the occupation’ is fine; ‘Here’s why you should vote <insert party name here>’ is not. There’s obviously a lot of grey area here, so please use your best judgment. - Selling – generally permitted. In the case of event tickets, such as formal halls, May balls, concerts, etc, you may advertise tickets for sale, but *refrain from sending pleading messages asking for tickets*. The principle here is that there will almost always be a willing buyer, especially for college events, so we don’t all need to know who you are. Use social networking sites, personal emails to spam your friends for tickets.
- Requesting – requests are not permitted except in truly exceptional circumstances. Please be considerate of the number of people on the email list, and that they may not necessarily wish to read your request. The mailing list should be a last resort – do explore other routes (such as social networking sites, personal emails etc) which are far more suited to requests. These have the added benefit of generally targeting your friends, who are more likely to respond. For the avoidance of doubt, requests for formal tickets are never allowed (see ‘Selling’ above).
- Abuse and harassment – Abusive or hateful messages sent over the info list will result in a swift ban and a formal complaint to the Senior Tutor.
- Replies – the list is not a public chat forum. In general, you want to be hitting the ‘reply’ button, not ‘reply all’, unless you’re 100% sure that all 300+ undergrads really need to read your response.
- Back-seat moderation – Don’t like a posting? Think there’s too much spam? Couldn’t care less about those upcoming events? Better hit ‘compose’ and let the whole world know, right? Wrong. This generates needless drama. Please direct any comments or complaints about the list to coordinator@kcsu.org.uk. This goes especially for complaints about spam. One of the natural consequences of a community noticeboard list is that you will receive e-mails that are not particularly relevant or of interest to you. Luckily, since emails are weightless, costless spirit letters, you can simply banish them back into the howling abyss with the delete key. That’s one keystroke compared to the many hundreds it would take you to clack out a public message of complaint. List messages apologising for previous inadvertent spamming should also be avoided, for obvious reasons.
- King’s societies – In order to give undergrads more choice over which emails they receive, college societies/groups are asked to use their own mailing lists to advertise their events, with a guideline that they may send around one email a term to the info list outlining their activities and soliciting signups to their mailing list.
Rules and policies are not restricted to the above, and will be amended as found appropriate. In any case, the email list administrators have the final say. Repeat offenders may be banned from posting emails to the KCSU Info mailing list.