Mailtalk Easter Service News 26/3/2010

The Mailtalk Helpline will be unmanned for the Easter break from Friday 2nd April to Monday 5th April inclusive. However, the Mailtalk service will continue to operate as normal during this period.

If you have any problems, please email the Helpline and your enquiries will be dealt with upon our return.

Mailtalk Upgraded To LISTSERV 16.0 09/03/10

We have upgraded to LISTSERV 16.0 to provide extra functionality and to be in keeping with the latest version of LISTSERV. Please note their maybe times when the Mailtalk web interface is slow today due to the re-indexing of archives for the new version.

The changes which are of interest are:

• Professional looking newsletters.
• New online posting options.
• New Archive preferences.
• New default group homepage look.
• Mail merge.
• Downloading reports including subscribers in CSV format.

For information on professional looking newsletters please see: http://www.Mailtalk.ac.uk/help/using/newsletter.htm

New online posting options:

To post a message to a group, go to your group homepage e.g. http://www.Mailtalk.ac.uk/Mailtalk-newsletter and click on post new message (you must be logged in; you may be asked to enter your login details). To view options click on show advanced. Here are the new options available to you:

• Schedule Delivery – Select whether you want the message to be delivered immediately or at a specific time and date. The input format of the Delivery Date field is yyyy-mm-dd. The input format of the Delivery Time field is hh:mm:ss, using the 24-hour clock. If you enter a delivery date or time that has already passed, then the message will be delivered immediately. Any pending messages will be shown in the post new message screen.
• Send test to self – When you have finished creating your message, you can use this button to send a test to yourself. The email that you are logged into will be sent the test message.
• Save Draft - If you wish to work on an email message at a later time or are writing a long email message, you may want to save a draft. Click the save draft button to save a copy. Please note any attachments or RSS abstracts will not be saved. You can see all the drafts in a table on the right hand side. Drafts will be kept for 30 days.
• RSS Abstract - LISTSERV automatically creates RSS abstract from the text part of the message. By default, LISTSERV uses a maximum of 500 and a minimum of 250 words for an implicit RSS abstract. However, this screen also allows you to create explicit RSS abstracts, which can be HTML or text of any length.

New archive preferences:

• Hovering Descriptions - Hovering your mouse over the subject line of a message (on the List Archive or Archive Index pages) will give you the RSS abstract information for that message.
• Default view - Select whether to view the HTML or Text part as the default for multipart messages. The default is HTML.

New default homepage look:

• Tools, JISC Services and posting options now arranged in boxes.
• Latest Messages on shown on the group Home Page.
• Choose the number of Messages shown on your group Home Page via preferences.

Additional List Owner features:

• Mail Merge - List owners can send an immediate email to subscribers who are set to receive digests or are set to NOMAIL. Please contact helpline@Mailtalk.ac.uk if you require this feature. Due to performance issues we can only enable this on a per list basis.
• Downloading reports including subscribers in CSV format - Group reports and subscriber reports can now be downloaded as CSV files, which make it easier to import list and subscriber data into Microsoft Excel or other applications. To download a report in this new format, simply click on the Report Format drop-down menu for that report, and select either CSV Format (Subset) or CSV Format (All).