New mailing list

You may have noticed on the right a new "widget" (it's also on our static page at www.scanames.org) to sign up for our email list. This is one of the advantages of using Google Groups to manage our email list. The biggest problem with the way we had been doing it is that email servers tend to assume you're spamming when you send to more than 100 recipients. As I'm no longer with the university, their listserv application is no longer available to me - and scanames@iastate.edu doesn't establish our nature as an independent neighborhood association very well.

Another advantage is that once you've joined, you can use the web interface in Google Groups to view an archive our our messages. If you aren't comfortable with the web interface, just plugging in your email (and answering my question about your interest in SCAN, designed to protect our group from random strangers) will have it working just like things were before -- emails from the group show up in the usual fashion.

I sent everyone on the old list one last email to let them know about the switch, and the response has been generally positive, although only about a third of the emails have shown up as subscribed. A few past SCAN members took advantage of the switch to let me know that they'd moved and were no longer interested in receiving emails, and there were also a number that had been "bouncing" already. Just to be clear, you are not automatically on the group just because you have received an invitation - you have to click the link in the email to be added. A message went out today about Stash the Trash this weekend, so if you didn't receive that you should either go back to the invite and make sure you accepted, or else just use the widget on the right. Relevant Google policies can be found at http://groups-beta.google.com/googlegroups/terms_of_service.html, http://groups-beta.google.com/googlegroups/privacy.html, and http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html.