NASA Agency Mailing List Service (AMLS)

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Mailing lists are a valuable tool for collaboration. This server hosts mailing lists from the agency level on down to the work group level, to support person-to-person(s) communications. Mixed work groups of NASA and industry or university partners are also encouraged to use the service. There is no charge to use the service. Any NASA employee (civil service or support service contractor) may request a mailing list. List owners manage their lists directly through the use of a Web interface.

Please read our list owner FAQ page and list member FAQ for additional information on the list service. Questions may also be sent to the list service support address mailman@lists.nasa.gov.

New NASA Agency Mailing Lists Requests

The Agency Mailing List Service (AMLS) is not currently accepting requests for the creation of new lists.  NASA Enterprise Collaboration Services is investigating an appropriate Agency replacement for both announcement and discussion list functionality.

Existing AMLS lists (i.e. those ending in @lists.nasa.gov) will continue to function normally at this time.

If the list you wish to create will be comprised of subscribers with only NASA electronic mail addresses (i.e., those ending in @nasa.gov), a NOMAD distribution list (DL) can be acquired. Documentation on NOMAD DLs can be found at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/itcd/nomad_dist_list.html

If the list you wish to create requires the inclusion of email addresses outside of @nasa.gov, further information can be found here http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/itcd/email_list.html

Existing list owners should consult the FAQ pages available at https://lists.nasa.gov/FAQ-owners.html prior to sending questions to mailman@lists.nasa.gov

Thank you,

AMLS

Service Rules and Limitations

List owners and users of this service are hereby notified that the AMLS has been designated by the cognizant NASA official as unsuitable and not intended for use as a NASA Records Retention system for the purposes of NASA Procedural Requirements (NPR) 1441.1D retention schedules. Any copies of email traffic or other data passing through the AMLS system(s) is retained for the sole purpose of enabling near term working group discussions. While best effort attempts will be made to retain any list archives configured by the list owners, these archives will be periodically reduced, and are considered incidental and secondary to the primary AMLS function of distributing new mailing list traffic in a timely and reliable manner. Individuals generating Federal Records materials as defined by NPR 1441.1D remain wholly responsible for the retention of official records. Use of this service is contingent upon acceptance of this policy.

This service should not be used for machine-to-machine communications, or for the archival of: automated system logs, cron outputs, transaction records, work orders, Help Desk tickets, support records or other similar materials. Distribution of these types of information to personnel may be performed, but the Agency Mailing List Service is not intended to supplement local system administration and system maintenance resources, or Program/Project management records processes by the storage of such information, however temporarily. Messages distributed through the Agency Mailing List Service should either be originated by manual human action, or be distributed to humans for dispositioning, or both. Mailing list discussion archives will be periodically pruned of older messages to keep their size manageable. The intent of offering mailing list discussion archives is to allow groups to maintain a recent history of information for reference by existing or newly arriving staff -- not to provide official or permanent archives of any project or activity (such a role should be performed by project-specific systems or methods). Machine-to-machine interactions have the potential to interfere with AMLS processing of human-to-human communications, and are not permitted for routing through this service. Mailing lists which are found to be acting as storage repositories for system logs, transaction records, project records, or as a means of automating machine-to-machine interactions, will be asked to relocate their operations elsewhere.

Mailing List Maintenance

To better maintain our service we, will be implementing scheduled AMLS maintenance. All mailing lists that have not been active in the past year, and lists with no members will be suggested to be deleted. This will help our team keep our service running and we thank you for your cooperation.

The AMLS maintenance team will also contacting mailing lists that contains all "@nasa.gov" members. The proper place for the creation and maintenance of such Internal (all @nasa.gov members) Distribution Lists is with the NASA Operational Messaging and Directory Service (NOMAD). The following PDF contains instructions on how to create a compliant Static Distribution List with a request to the Enterprise Service Desk (ESD): NASA Internal Mailing List

Lists on lists.nasa.gov

A table of all the mailing lists hosted on lists.nasa.gov is available to systems registered in the nasa.gov DNS domain. This information is generated once per day.

Some list owners have opted to advertise the existence of their mailing lists to the general public. The Mailman list information page displays those mailing lists.

Support

The system runs continuously, and administrators are available to tend it during normal business hours (weekdays 8am to 6pm eastern time). If the server hardware fails, service restoration could take several hours. Messages sent to the system during the outage would normally be queued by upstream mail servers and delivered once service is restored. Inbound messages are typically sent out to subscribers within a few minutes. However, mail delivery relies on numerous external networks and mail relays, and it is not possible for us to guarantee message delivery times. All this said, the service's record has been good: in over 6 years of continuous operation on multiple generations of hardware (as of 2009), service availability has been over 99.9%.

Currently we have an offline stand-by system for redundancy. We have 24x7 on-site maintenance with a 4HR RTS agreement from the vendor.

However, the system is only Certified and Accredited at FIPS-199 Low. As such, we do not recommend that AMLS be used in emergency or mission critical situations that require guaranteed availability.

There is a FAQ for list members and a FAQ for list owners. If this information doesn't help solve your problem, send email to: mailman@lists.nasa.gov.

List server software

The mailing list software used is called Mailman. Documentation for list members and also for list owners is available on the web.

Mailman provides a web-based interface for managing nearly all aspects of mailing lists. Users may subscribe and unsubscribe themselves, change their email addresses, decide whether to receive messages as they come in or as a periodic compilation, view archives of past messages (if enabled) and more.

List owners can manage their lists themselves without involving any third party at all. Numerous features allow list owners to deal with unusual list traffic (such as large messages, or messages sent by non-list-members) on a case-by-case basis, even on unmoderated lists.

For more information, read a summary of Mailman's features.