Mailing list for educators in vision impairment
- About SPEVI List
- Joining SPEVI List
- Sending a message to SPEVI List
- How to send a Plain Text email
- Setting auto responders
- Avoiding attachments
- Bounced messages - possible causes
- Excluding SPEVI List from your email address book
- Unsubscribing and changing your details
- Help
About SPEVI List
The mailing list (known as SPEVI List) is provided as a membership service to facilitate communication between members. Messages emailed to SPEVI List will be automatically forwarded to every other member who is on the list.
The list is an open, moderated web forum intended to facilitate discussion and exchange of ideas. The value of SPEVI List is the collective knowledge and experience of SPEVI members, which can be shared to benefit students with vision impairment. Anything to do with SPEVI or vision impairment can be discussed freely, provided it is consistent with SPEVI's aims. For example, SPEVI List is the place to:
- Seek assistance from others regarding education issues for students with vision impairments
- Let members know about research projects you are undertaking
- Share assistive technology solutions and innovative approaches to teaching
- Publicise funding opportunities
- Advertise job vacancies
- Promote conferences, seminars
- Tell others about the availability of interesting publications, new equipment, etc
Members have a duty to use the list responsibly and to avoid causing offence or embarrassment to other users
As a guideline, the following activities are considered to be inconsistent with the mission and objectives of SPEVI, and therefore unsuitable uses of the mailing list:
- Requesting or offering advice pertaining to the medical or therapeutic treatment of a student
- Advertising of goods or services for sale, other than in direct response to a request for information
Members are expected to declare a commercial interest if recommending equipment or devices via the SPEVI List and to only offer advice which is reasonably within the limits of their knowledge.
Joining SPEVI List
To join the SPEVI List you must be a current member. Since the list is a member-only service, all subscription requests require approval - please allow time for a committee member to complete the authorisation process. Once approved, you will receive a welcome message from the list, after which you will be able to send and receive messages. Please keep the welcome message somewhere safe as it has all the information you need to manage your list subscription and send messages to the list.
To subscribe to the list simply fill in the list subscription form. Once you have done this an email notice will be sent (to the email address you provided) with a unique subscription request number. You need to reply to this email in order to subscribe.
Please note, the SPEVI List is:
- Limited to one email per membership
- Restricted to messages sent from the nominated email address
- Reconciled each year one month after the deadline for membership renewals, and non-members unsubscribed
Sending a message to SPEVI List
The SPEVI List email address is provided in your welcome message (its not provided here to prevent abuse by spammers).
There are a few important things to note when posting a message to the list:
- Messages need to be sent from the same email address you provided when you subscribed (otherwise they will bounce as a non-member subscription)
- Use plain text only - formatted messages and/or email signatures sent in styled or html markup are not understood by the listserve software (this includes messages with images or scripts in them)
- Please do not use attachments
- SPEVI List should be the only recipient
- Keep messages brief and to the point (very long messages are likely to bounce)
- It also helps to add your reply comments near the top of the message, and only quote essential parts of previous messages - this way there are less quote markings for others to wade through
- Include your personal contact details in the message or signature of your email, so that members can reply to you directly if appropriate
The listserve automatically dispatches your message to each subscriber on SPEVI List and appends the tag [SPEVI List] to the subject line of each message for easy identification.
How to send a Plain Text email
Messages to the list need to be sent in plain text format - this involves writing the email in text and sending it as plain text. The first part is straightforward, while the second part depends on the preferences set up in your email program.
If you normally send messages in HTML format you can change this on an individual email basis by choosing the 'plain text' format for messages to the SPEVI List. Depending on your email program this may be under Tools or Options or Preferences.
The following websites provide tips on how to do this:
Setting auto responders
If you use auto responders on your email program when you take leave, please make sure you exclude responses to any mail with the SPEVI List email in any header. If you cannot do this within your email software, then please unsubscribe from the SPEVI List until you return.
Another solution is to ensure that the auto-responder only works for messages sent 'To' yourself and not to messages that are sent using 'Cc' or 'Bcc'. This will work for all list servers as the message is always sent 'Bcc'.
Avoiding attachments
To help avoid the circulation of viruses, the SPEVI List does not allow attachments. It is preferable to:
- Provide a short message with a web site link or contact email for further information, or
- Include the information in the body of the email (provided it is not too long)
This approach allows people who are interested in more detail on a specific topic to follow it up individually, while:
- Limiting the possibility of circulating viruses
- Minimising problems for people experiencing slow connections
- Providing members with a choice (rather than forcing everyone on the list to download the file, whether interested or not)
- Ensuring that the content of messages are accessible to all members (eg some attachments, such as PDF files, may not be accessible to screen readers)
Bounced messages - possible causes
The most common cause of bounced messages is sending the message from a non-member email account. This might happen if you post from a different computer of if your email address has changed.
Sometimes certain words will cause a post to bounce, such as including "help", "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the subject line or body of the message. These words are reserved for admin requests and for security reasons such messages are sent to the list owner rather than the list. Try changing the word/s to another word that will convey the same or similar meaning and resend your message.
The listserve software will also not send very long messages. If your message has bounced because it has exceeded the size limit please consider summarising the content.
Other possible causes for a bounced message are attachments, multiple recipients, or formatted content (eg HTML).
Excluding SPEVI List from your email address book
Some viruses proliferate by sending a copy of the virus to every other address in your email address book. To help avoid this problem, list members are asked not to include the SPEVI List email in their address book.
Unsubscribing and changing your details
You can do this by email or via your personal subscription page on the SPEVI web site. Email instructions and a link to your subscription page is provided in the welcome message you received when you joined the list.
Help
For assistance with problems accessing or using spevi list, please contact Sandra Vassallo at e-bility, who is the administrator for this list.