LISTSERV ® Email Lists Terms of Service

LISTSERV ® Email Lists service by L-soft is administered and supported by GW Information Technology (IT) for University related communications. GW IT will create lists, provide support for list owners, and maintain the list server software (LISTSERV ® by L-soft).

Requesting an Email List

This service can only be requested by University faculty and staff for the following purposes:

• Conducting official GW business
• Supporting GW research initiatives
• Departmental communication
• Academic communication
• GW instructional activities
• Officially-sponsored clubs or organizations

Affiliates, students and student organizations must have faculty or staff sponsorship who will need to be listed as one of the owners of the email list. Email list requests that do not meet the above criteria will have their requests denied.

Request a LISTSERV ® Email List

List Owner Responsibilities 

List Owners are responsible for properly managing their LISTSERV ® Email List on a day-to-day basis. The responsibilities of the list owner include:

• Ensuring that at least one owner of the email list has a valid faculty/staff gwu.edu address.
• Assisting subscribers with subscribing or unsubscribing to the email list. List Owners may not subscribe individuals who have not requested membership on a list, although schools and academic departments may add their students to a list for educational program communications purposes.
• Responding to errors related to their email list, such as delivery and remove errors.
• Monitoring discussion of the email list and the content of messages and archives, and enforcing rules of conduct for the email list.
• Determining whether the messages will be archived and who can view the archives. (Most List Owners configure the archives to be viewable only by members subscribed to the email list.)
• Adhering to the GW E-Mail Policy and Acceptable Use of IT Resources Policy.

Email List Archive Expiration and Removal

Archived messages of active email lists will be retained on the service for no more than three years. GW IT reserves the right to remove archives from individual lists that use excessive amounts of storage. In that case, the List Owner will be contacted and given the opportunity to copy those archive files to other storage media.

Email List Removal

LISTSERV ® Email Lists are reviewed periodically to see if they are active; an email list is considered active if it meets the following three criteria:

• An email has been distributed to its subscribers within the past 12 months, and
• One of the List Owners is a valid faculty/staff email address ending in @gwu.edu or @email.gwu.edu, and
• The email list has active sub-lists or at least 2 subscribers.

List Owners will be notified via email 30 days and 14 days prior to email list removal. It is the responsibility of the List Owner to obtain any pertinent data (like message archives) from the service prior to the removal date. If the List Owners’ email address is no longer valid, or the List Owners is consistently unreachable or unresponsive, the email list is subject to immediate removal.

Email lists found to be outside the original stated purpose or in violation of the GW E-Mail Policy and Acceptable Use of IT Resources Policy may be removed.

List Owners may also request that a email list be removed by logging in and completing the request form.