[PCA] ADMIN: List Posting Guidelines and Stopping Computer Viruses

[Plant Conservation]

Hi everyone,

First off, I'm sorry about letting through a message with such a long list
of To: addresses!  I was trying to do a few things quickly and hadn't
noticed that the message had such a long header.  My apologies to you all.

This brings up to topic of a few guidelines you should be aware of when
posting to the list.  These are simple courtesies that will help make
things easier and more useful for all of us.

- If you are posting about a specific event or job, please put the city
and state in the Subject line.  I cannot stress to you enough that this is
a nationwide list and even has a few people from other countries
subscribed as well.  Don't forget to include contact information for the
event and the specific date/dates.

- If you are sending out a notice to a long list of people, please use the
BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) option instead of the To option.  Most mail
programs should have this available.  If you don't know how to use it or
can't find it, try checking the help file or as a last resort please drop
me a note so I can help you find it.  This saves us from having to scroll
through dozens of lines of addresses and also keeps the addresses you have
collected private.

- Do not try to attach large files to your posts.  I generally do not
allow posts that are over 130Kb in size so that users with slower
connections do not suffer having to download piles of large messages they
may not be interested in.  Also please do not attach a Word document as
your post because not everyone has that software.  Instead, you can simple
copy and paste the text into your message.

And as a last note, I want to encourage all of you to keep your computers
up to date in regards to the various computer virus issues that are out
there.  If you are running Windows, keep your computer patched.  To do
this for the newer versions, go to Windows Update
(http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/) every few weeks just to check that
you have all the latest critical updates.

You should also run anti-virus software to protect against viruses.  This
is especially important for users of Outlook as many viruses target that
program.  Even after you install the software and run regular scans
checking for & cleaning out viruses, make sure to download updated virus
definitions every few weeks in order to stay current with any new ones.

Currently due to viruses on other people's computers and the public nature
of this address, I receive anywhere from 50-100 e-mails a day and not all
of them can be automatically filtered.  This also explains why it often
takes me so long to reply to some of you...

Thanks for reading this! (A customized copy of this message is going out
to all the lists on this server, so just read one copy if you're
subscribed to more than one list and delete the others.)

Olivia
SER/PCA
http://www.nps.gov/plants/