The Informatics mailing list service has been running for many years (decades). The move to Ubuntu has highlighted its age, and it is a bit of an oddity in terms of services that Informatics run (we shouldn’t be duplicating services that are provided centrally by the University).

With this in mind we have started the process of decommissioning the lists.inf.ed.ac.uk Mailman service.

The first step is to close all the manually maintained mailing lists (initially about 800 lists). These are the lists who’s memberships are not automatically generated by the School database. Lists like “inf-people@inf” will continue, but “inf-bikes@inf” will be closed and deleted.

We have already deleted (and notified the owners) of any lists that have not had a post to them in over two years. Leaving about 170 manually maintained lists to be dealt with.

The owners of these manually managed lists will be contacted to warn them of their impending closure, and will be pointed at the central Sympa service.

For those lists that remain necessary, we have some guidance on how to create a new replacement list on the Sympa service on computing.help – https://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/information-services-mailing-list-service

We can setup a forward of the old inf-bikes@inf address to the new equivalent inf-bikes@mlist.is address (for example), but for technical and resource reasons we cannot migrate lists en-mass to Sympa. List owners will need to do that.

From a GDPR point of view this is actually a good opportunity clean up a list’s membership. Simply post one last message to the @inf version of the list informing those members who wish to remain on the list re-subscribe to the new equivalent list. This way you know they have explicitly opted in to be on the list, and are not there for some unknown historical reason.

We understand this will be disruptive to some lists, hence the time frame before the lists are closed, which will be June 1st 2025. List owners will receive regular reminders, so as not to leave everything to the last minute.

There is the possibility that your list could be driven from the School database, and hence not need migrated. This will only work for lists that happen to be made up of an already existing group of Informatics users, with no external people.

If you need to request an old list address is forwarded to a new one on the Sympa service, or to discuss the possibility of making your list a database driven one, then please use the computing support form.

Thank you for your understanding.

Neil
Services Unit

Retirement of lists.inf.ed.ac.uk / Computing Systems by is licensed under a