Google Groups and Sympa Lists

Services for the distribution of simultaneous e-mail messages.

UniTrento users, have access to two different services for managing email distribution: Google Groups and Sympa University Mailing List services. Both allow you to send e-mails simultaneously to multiple addressee.
The IT staff can guide the user in the choice of one system or the other, according to specific characteristics and needs.

Google groups


Google Groups
Groups are part of the Google for Education suite and allow you to create mailing lists and forums among the University members.
These groups are born to be a public / collaborative tool and therefore are easy to use, have few restrictions and are completely free.
Creating and maintaining a group is simple if basic configurations are maintained; quite the opposite is the management of sending authorisations to limit the access.

Groups can be created independently by users, but they must be validated by a user of the IT staff to be operational.
In fact, each new group is created with the temporary name groupnamernoos72391n9-unverified@unitn.it and it changes only after the official validation.
Groups can be created in the domain @ unitn.it, or alternatively in the @ department.unitn.it one and are visible in the University Address Book (i.e. in the list of available addresses under "Directory" in the Contacts interface on Gmail box of the institutional address).
For further information, see the official Google guide.

 

Sympa Mailing List
 

 

Sympa Mailing Lists are based on a private / unidirectional concept, more restrictive than Google Groups and are characterized by custom configurations. This point is in favour of greater security of access permissions but leads to a more complex implementation of the list by the user.

There are two types of lists in Sympa:

  • official lists: they are managed by the Cloud and Collaboration Office and by the Human Resources and Organization Department - DRUO (as well as by the PhD Office for the PhD students’ lists). These are lists based on automatic rules related to their respective roles. These include lists of teachers, administrative technical staff, researchers and so on.
  • local lists: these lists are for the User Support that creates or approves lists based on specific needs. They can be static (based on manual rules), dynamic (based on automatic rules) or mixed.

The lists have a mail address @ list.unitn.it or @ list.dipartimento.unitn.it or @ list.centro.unitn.it and are NOT included in the University address book (so they are not visible by default in Gmail).

You can scroll through the active lists by consulting the dedicated application after authentication.


The Sympa service is described in more detail on the dedicated page.

 

Note
Google services are based on the Google Suite for Education cloud platform that also manages the antivirus and antispam service. The restriction of sending and receiving are defined by Google itself.
The Sympa service, on the other hand, is implemented and configured by UniTrento on a virtual platform, and is protected by an anti-virus and anti-spam server. Limits on the size of any attachment is defined internally.

 

 

Contacts
For any request on the Google Groups service or on the Sympa lists, we suggest you to "open a ticket" by authenticating on the University Service Desk platform: the Users Support will be able to recommend you the best product according to your needs.