Requesting a Bboard for Group Email Access

Many departments would like to have a departmental email address which allows access to a specified group of people. For group access to a single contact email address, we recommend the use of an email alias along with an electronic bboard. The email alias is the advertised email address for your group. This email address is then set to forward mail to the bboard. This provides a single email address used to contact your group but multiple people are able to read and respond to the messages.

Note: Your email client can also be configured to show the email alias as the "From" and "Reply To" address on outgoing mail. This is referred to as using a separate identity. Please see the documentation for your specific email client (Outlook, Entourage, Webmail) for detailed steps to create these identities.

Requesting an Email Alias

To request an email alias, send the following information to advisor@andrew.cmu.edu.
Note: If you have not already requested your bboard, combine the following information with your bboard request.

1. Name of the mail alias (i.e., the email address): This address can be any length, but must contain a hyphen. This is required to differentiate the alias from a standard Andrew userID (e.g., our-department@andrew.cmu.edu).
2. Name of the bboard: Specify the name of the bboard that mail will be forwarded to.
3. List of Andrew userIDs with permission to read, post, and delete messages from the bboard.

Requesting a Bboard

Before requesting a new bboard, verify that a bboard for this purpose does not already exist. Use the Subscribing to Folders and Bboards section of the Outlook documentation to search for available bboards. (Instructions for displaying bboards in Entourage and Webmail are also available.)

To set up a new restricted posting/reading bboard, send the following information to advisor@andrew.cmu.edu.

1. Bboard tree
   Use the descriptions above to determine under which tree the bboard should be located.
2. Bboard name
   This should include the tree name and adhere to the following naming rules.
   • Do not include any spaces in the bboard name
   • The name must be alpha-numeric characters and must not include any symbols, dashes or dots (other than those necessary to separate the tree structure, e.g., official.computing-news).
   • All lowercase letters.
3. List of Andrew userIDs that should have read access.
   • The name of a PTS group is acceptable. If you have many people who need access to this bboard, we recommend that you create a PTS group for them.
4. List of Andrew userIDs that should have "post" access to the bboard.
   • Again, the name of a PTS group is acceptable.
5. List of Andrew userIDs that should have administrative access to the bboard (i.e., permission to grant access rights to others).
6. List of Andrew userIDs that should have rights to delete items from the bboard.
7. Email this information to advisor@andrew.cmu.edu.