Goodbye Majordomo

It is going to be a long farewell, but by now you should all be aware that we are transitioning from Majordomo to Google Groups for the HMC  Mailing Lists.  This is a transition from a very old technology to a more modern (and more complex) one, and there will inevitably be growing pains.   Some of the key lists (course, major, faculty-l, staff-l, students-l) have been moved and we have introduced more automation, which means that the list membership will be kept complete, a task that was difficult before.  For example, faculty-l on majordomo was forwarded to other lists that were manually maintained, and it was sometimes uncertain whether someone was on the (underlying) departmental lists.   One saw evidence of these difficulties in the fact that a random set of individual email addresses was included in faculty-l, itself manually maintained.  Thanks to the Google API for groups, we now automatically add faculty to the faculty@g.hmc.edu list based on their status in the CX database.

There are thousands of lists left on majordomo and we don’t yet have a timeline for the final retirement of that system, but I will keep you updated.

We acknowledge that many people were used to Majordomo and had its commands and addresses in muscle memory. It would be worth your while to take ten minutes to get acquainted with Google Groups on the HMC google apps site at http://groups.g.hmc.edu.  Our Service Catalog page at https://www.hmc.edu/cis/services/google-groups-mailing-lists/ is a good jumping off point to learn more.

Some people have asked if we could simply have “@hmc.edu” addresses instead of “g.hmc.edu”.  For complicated reasons that is not possible at the moment, but that is our target and removing majordomo from our “mail central” system is a key step in that direction.