November 14th, 2024 – Order Mailing Lists moving to Google

Greetings East Kingdom,
I am writing today to inform you that on November 29th order discussion and announcement mailing lists will be migrated from the current lists.eastkingdom.org Mailman platform to an East Kingdom Google Group. We anticipate lists will only be unavailable for a brief window on that day, but will monitor and react as needed for several days.

What does this mean?
The software that runs the mailing list is changing. The membership, function, and practices of the list are not changing. We will automatically migrate all the existing members to the new Google Group, and owners/moderators will have the equivalent access and permissions to the Google Group. These lists will remain restricted, as they are now, and will require moderators to approve new members, as before. 

Why are we moving the lists?
Google is leading the industry in preventing spam and other email abuse. Recently, they have announced that mailing lists that do not include one-click unsubscribe links in their messages may be flagged as email abuse and may not appear in the inboxes of GMail users. Our current Mailman mailing list platform does not support one-click unsubscribe links in messages, and the developers of the product do not intend to change this. As we are already using GMail and Google Groups throughout the Kingdom, migrating Order lists to Google Groups is the surest way to guarantee that list messages continue to be properly received by individuals using GMail.

What about people who don’t use GMail? Or Google at all?
A Google account is not required to subscribe to a Google Group based mailing list. Anyone may send an email to ‘listname+subscribe@lists.eastkingdom.org’ to request being added to the list. Those already subscribed to lists with non-Google personal email addresses will continue to be subscribed. 

Anything else I should know?
As a part of this transition, East Kingdom Webministry will be disabling digest mode on these lists. At this time there is not a way to enable digest mode without also enabling archives, and we do not want to keep archives where new inductees may see previous discussions of their candidacy. However, practically every current email application supports threading of messages, and this serves the same function of digest mode in batching together emails so that recipients are not bombarded with a series of emails on the same subject. The East Kingdom Webministry Helpdesk will be available to assist recipients in configuring threaded email mode, or creating email filtering to support recipients in managing their Order lists emails. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at help@helpdesk.eastkingdom.org

Thank you,
Symon of Barnesdale, East Kingdom Webminister