Group Mailings and Mailing Lists

Email communications sometimes need to go out to the same group of people on a regular basis. Depending on your needs there are various ways to accomplish this at Lehigh. Here are some of the most common methods that are used.

• Lehigh Google Groups  is one of the G Suite applications available to Lehigh. Google Groups is highly configurable and easy to manage in that it has a menu-driven interface, and subscribers can manage their membership through a similar easy interface.  Google Groups is self-managed, that is you don't need to ask LTS to setup or create a group for you.  In addition to being used for mail, Google groups can also be used for sharing calendars, inviting people to events, and g drive file and folder sharing.
• Contacts - In Lehigh Gmail, a "Contact Group" can be created in Contacts. Once created, the group or list name is used to insert multiple predetermined email recipients into the TO: line.  For example, a list named "buildingcontacts" could be used to store the email addresses of staff. This is a suitable solution when the list does not change very often and when the list is not overly large.  If you use a contacts group, if you don't want everyone to see who you sent your message to, use the BCC option when composing the message.

Google groups have at least one owner / moderator / manager who controls the settings of the list and possibly the membership.  They can be configured to send to internal / external users.  Some lists are configured to be announcement-only type lists for sending out communications, but not discussion, while others are most open to discussion allow list members or even anyone access to post to the list.