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Peeps-managed Lab Mailing Lists

Overview

Peeps is CSAIL’s HR database; all current CSAIL members should be listed in it.

There are several CSAIL mailing lists whose membership is entirely controlled by Peeps. You can’t unsubscribe yourself from these lists or change your email address. (Well, you can, but any changes will be un-done by an automated script.)

Membership in these lists is controlled by information stored about you in the Peeps HR database – stuff like where your office is (which is used to decide which floor list you should be on), what your appointment type is, and so on.

You are added to these lists under the email address you gave HR when you joined CSAIL. (That’s often not your CSAIL email address, and it may or may not be the same place your CSAIL email address points to.)

If you want a different address subscribed to the Peeps-managed lists, you can contact HR at csail-hr@mit.edu and have them change your email address in the Peeps database. That will change your subscription on all the Peeps-managed mailing lists the next time they’re synchronized with Peeps. (It will not change your subscription to other mailing lists, not managed by Peeps.)

csail-all

One of the most important Peeps-managed lists is csail-all; that list should have everyone with an official CSAIL appointment. It’s used only for important Lab announcements that everybody at CSAIL should read.

List settings

The list membership of these lists is synchronized with the Peeps HQ database, but other aspects of the list configuration (such as who can post, whether the list is archived and if so who can access the archives, and so on) are not.

In particular, some of these lists allow any list member to post without their posts being held for moderation, and some only allow a certain small number of people to post. (It matters for this purpose what address you’re subscribed to the list under; if a list allows posts from list members, you’ll generally need to post from the address you’re subscribed under or be added as an explicit exception. That’s a reason its helpful if HR has the address you normally use listed in Peeps.)

Examples

Besides csail-all, mentioned above, there are a number of other Peeps-managed mailing lists. Some examples are:

Floor lists like second-floor, d4, g5, etc., which list everybody whose office is on a given floor.
csail-pi, grads, research-scientists, visitors, and the like, based on what kind of CSAIL member you are. (There’s an undergrads list which I believe is mostly UROPs, since undergrads who just happen to get a CSAIL account for some work they’re doing don’t generally have official Lab apointments.)
admin-assistants which is a superset of pi-aas.
ai-pis, w3c-pis, and a couple similar lists

For a full listing as of this writing (with links to whatever list-specific information there is about the list), see “Exhaustive list” below.

Troubleshooting

If you’re not on a list you think you should be on (or you’re getting mail at the wrong address) there are a few possible reasons:

HR might have the wrong appointment type, office location, or status for you in the database. You can contact HR at csail-hr@mit.edu to ask to have that fixed. Make sure they know to re-export mailing lists after making the change.
HR might have the wrong email address listed for you (e.g. an email address at your previous institution, from before you joined CSAIL). Again in this case you can contact csail-hr@mit.edu to ask to have this changed. Make sure they know to re-export mailing lists after making the change.
The list you’re interested in might actually be maintained manually by a human being, rather than automatically generated out from the Peeps database. In that case, you may be able to subscribe yourself (perhaps with a list moderator’s approval) or you may need to contact a list admin separately and ask to be added. In either case, the place to start (to find the subscription form or figure out who manages the list) is the list’s “listinfo” page at https://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/LISTNAME. There’s a subscription form on that page, and if you scroll down to the bottom, you also see a line like “Foobar list run by foo at csail.mit.edu, bar at csail.mit.edu” which tells you who runs the list.

Exhaustive list

These are the CSAIL Mailman mailing lists currently (as of April 2, 2020) being managed by Peeps, i.e. synchronized with CSAIL HR’s database of Lab members. (See also the much shorter list of Peeps-managed Opt-out Lab Mailing Lists)