How to Manage your Athena Lists | Who to Contact for Help | Glossary of List Management Terms

How to Manage your Athena Lists

Athena List Management is one of the tools list owners have to manage their lists. Other tools include blanche and listmaint on Athena. To get started, you will need MIT Personal Certificates on your machine. Once you have them, select any function, provide a list name, and press enter on your keyboard, or 'Go'. Each page of the web interface has context sensitive help to guide you. [top of help]

Who to Contact for Help

If you do need further assistance with your lists, Athena User Accounts provides assistance with Athena list concerns, including creating new lists, modifying lists, and deleting lists. If you have trouble using this interface to maintain your lists, please contact Accounts at accounts@mit.edu, or 617-253-1325. [top of help]

Glossary of List Management Terms

List Description
A short description may be specified for an Athena list. This description is displayed for lists which are not marked hidden if list information is generated by another Athena user. [top of help]

Mailing List
An Athena list is by default a mailing list. That means that the members of the list will be mailable through the address listname@mit.edu, which will distribute the mail the all the members of the list. Such a list may include email addresses for users outside of MIT. Lists can be both a mailing list and a group. [top of help]

Group
In addition to (or instead of) being a mailing list, an Athena list can also be a group. A group can be used as an access control list on the AFS file system, for example. If you wish to be able to set access permissions on an Athena directory or locker for the members of your list, you should choose to make it a group. When a list can maintain a file space on Athena, it is also has a group ID number.

Note that only Athena users on your list will be able to take advantage of this feature. If you have any other members on your list, such as email addresses outside of MIT, they will not be able to access Athena file systems. [top of help]

List Administrator(s)
Every Athena mailing list must be owned by one or more administrators. Administrators have the power to change list characteristics. Administrators can be a user or another Athena list. [top of help]

List Permissions
These describe the state of the list and what users who are not the administrator can do with the list. A list's permissions can be viewed with the "display list characteristics" option, and edited by list owners with the "update list characteristics" option.

• active -- the list is live and usable
• inactive -- the list has been turned off, is still in the system, but mail sent will bounce and/or group permissions will not work
• public -- any user can add themselves to this list
• private -- only the administrator can add users to the list
• visible -- any user can view basic information about a list, such as membership and administrators
• hidden -- list information is hidden, but can be viewed by the list administrators

Last Modification
This tells you when the list was last changed in some way and by who. [top of help]

Athena User
Email addresses of the form name@mit.edu usually indicate name is an Athena username (also sometimes called a Kerberos Name or MIT Network ID). To add an Athena user to an Athena list, you enter only member name to the left of the @. For example, to add eclapton@mit.edu to an Athena list, provide 'eclapton' as the member name. [top of help]

List
An Athena list is by default a mailing list. That means that the members of the list will be mailable through the address listname@mit.edu, which will distribute the mail the all the members of the list. Such a list may include email addresses for users outside of MIT.

List members can be other Athena lists, of the form listname@mit.edu. To add an Athena list as a member of another Athena list, enter only the part of the address before the @ symbol. For example, to add accounts@mit.edu as a member, provide 'accounts' as the member name. [top of help]

String
Athena lists often have non-MIT users and lists as members. To add an email address that contains an @ but is outside of mit.edu, such as mitalum@anotherisp.net, you add them as member type string. To add a string, provide the complete address, including information on both sides of the @. [top of help]

Kerberos Principal
Specifying a list member as a Kerberos principal allows a member to be on a list without receiving any email sent to the list. This is a rarely used member type. [top of help].