Overview
This document will walk you through the creation and management of East Kingdom Mailing Lists, as well describe the differences between managing such Lists compared to managing Officer email.
Since this document will be focused on the differences between the management of Mailing Lists as compared to Officer email, it is assumed you have already read through the Creating A New Office Email Address document. At the end of the creation process you will have a Google Group tied to the East Kingdom and owned by the specified account(s).
Creating a New List
Creating Mailing Lists, just like Officer email, starts in the FusionDirectory portal, located at https://members.eastkingdom.org/fusiondirectory. Steps 1 and 2 (navigating to Groups and Roles, and selecting your Branch/Department) are identical to the steps described in Creating A New Office Email Address.
In order to reflect the difference between Offices and Mailing Lists, we had to choose a different type of “object” in the FusionDirectory interface. The object type that we chose is referred to as a “POSIX group” (for those of you familiar with that term, please be aware that we’re not actually creating a POSIX group – this is just so we can treat this group type differently).
In short, to create a Mailing List in GfNP, we will create a POSIX group in the FusionDirectory interface.
Step 3) Mouse-over the “Actions” menu, then “Create”, and finally click on “POSIX group”.
As you do this, note the different icon used for the POSIX group. This will help you tell the difference visually.
Steps 4-7 are almost identical to that for creating an Office (refer back to Creating A New Office Email Address if you need a refresher), except that instead of adding group members, we will only use FusionDirectory to manage list owners. You can set more than one owner, but due to requirements in Google, your list owner must be a person – it cannot be assigned to a group. Fortunately, the FusionDirectory software does not allow us to add other groups as members of POSIX groups, so you don’t have to worry about anything breaking.
Important Note
As as you start creating this new group, you will see that the “Mail” and “Partage” tabs are available right away. This differs from the behavior of Office emails. However, do not set these right away. In order to make sure that the email address for your group is valid, the system needs you to set the properties on the ‘Group’ tab, click OK, and then re-open the group – just like you do when creating Officer email addresses.
If you do not, the system will through an error like the one below, and you will have to remove those settings and follow the normal steps.
Managing List Owners
The process to change the Owner(s) of a Mailing List follows the same steps that you use for changing the Office holder, as detailed in “Changing Office Holders in FusionDirectory.”
If you have people that you want to have a elevated privilege for your list, but do not have a members.eastkingdom.org account, they cannot be made Owners. However, you can make them a Manager through the Google Groups interface.
Do not manage your List Owners through the Google Groups interface. While the interface will allow it, the list owners will be completely reset when normal EK maintenance processes occur, and your changes will be silently overwritten.
Differences between Officer and Mailing List “group” types
Even though Google treats both our Offices and Mailing List as groups, some settings are different between the two that affect their behavior. Those items marked with an asterisk(*) will be covered in more detail in “Using Google Groups”.
| Setting | Office Emails | Mailing Lists |
| Visible on groups.google.com | No | Yes |
| Allows group members from outside of eastkingdom.org | No | Yes |
| Who can send email to the group address | Anyone in the world | Depends on settings* |
| Is “Archived” | No | Sometimes* |
| Who can see the archive (if it exists) | n/a | Depends on settings* |