 | Subscribing to Yahoo! Groups. |
| Signing in to Yahoo! Groups. |
| Forgotten password or ID? |
The Public Health Medicine Environment Group has set up a range of ‘virtual’ network groups, with the aim of sharing ideas, good practice and networking. These ‘Yahoo! Groups’ will be administered from http://groups.yahoo.com/. The PHMEG Yahoo! group is the main method by which the PHMEG executive will communicate with PHMEG members, so all members will be added to the group, unless they expressly ask not to be in it.
This page gives detailed instructions on how to set up, manage and get the best of a Yahoo! groups account. Yahoo! sometimes change the screens and ways of doing things: if you become aware that these instructions are no longer correct, or have any other problems following them, please email webmaster@phmeg.org.uk explaining the problem.
Yahoo! Groups (formerly eGroups) are a free email group service that allows you to easily create and join email groups. Email groups offer a convenient way to connect with others who share the same interests and ideas.
How do Yahoo! Groups work?You can send messages to the whole group using just one email address, which has the following format: PHMEG@yahoogroups.com. When someone replies to the email, everyone get the reply too. Yahoo! Groups also make it easy to store photos and files, coordinate events, and more. Please remember to identify yourself by including your name at the end of any email you send to the entire group – it’s not always obvious from your email address.
The PHMEG group – and all messages, files, and other facilities available at the group’s web pages – are accessible ONLY to PHMEG members.
To get to most of the following groups you have to be a group member, and to have subscribed to Yahoo! (see "How to subscribe").
Home page (membership not required)
If you have any queries or problems please send an email to PHMEG-owner@egroups.com and NOT to the group egroup address.
Back to top Emails to individualsIf you wish to send comments to an individual on the group please send it to their personal email address and NOT the group address (Do not press ‘reply’ to the egroup mail, but ‘forward’ and cut & paste the person’s email address). This will save everyone’s inbox being filled with clutter!
Back to topThe moderator of the PHMEG electronic group will subscribe members whose email address is known to PHMEG. Many members will already have been subscribed to the group, and will already be receiving email sent to the group.
If you are a paid-up member of PHMEG, and you are not receiving email from this electronic group, please let the PHMEG membership secretary know. Alternatively, you could send an email to PHMEG-owner@yahoogroups.com. Please note that if you do this you will not immediately be subscribed to the electronic group: your membership standing will first have to be checked with the membership secretary.
Making the most of your Yahoo! Groups membership. | Subscribing to Yahoo! Groups. |
| Signing in to Yahoo! Groups. |
| Forgotten password or ID? |
Before you can make use of the full range of services provided by the electronic group, you need to register as a user of Yahoo! Groups. You will need to choose a "profile", also known as an "ID" or "user name", and a password.
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If you have previously registered as a member of eGroups, and have not updated your membership to Yahoo! Groups please go to http://groups.yahoo.com/convwiz and follow the instructions on that page. For more information on this process, click on the "Learn More" link on that web page (or go to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/groups-34.html); and for more help, please go to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/groups-37.html.
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If you have not previously registered with eGroups, you simply need to register with Yahoo! Groups. To do this, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/ and click on the "New Users: click here to register" link and follow the instructions on screen.
(Incidentally, you can use your Yahoo! ID as part of a Yahoo! email address. You can set this up to forward email to any email address you choose. For instance, mail sent to pmbework@yahoo.co.uk is forwarded to me at my office email address. This can be very useful, for example, if you change jobs, or your work email address is changed. If you use your yahoo email address people need not know your real email address is changed – your contacts can continue to email the yahoo address, and you just change the address the mail is forwarded to. Other email providers will do similar things – I mainly use www.email.com and www.bigfoot.com for this – see http://www.fam-english.demon.co.uk/linksto.htm#EmailSites for more information.)
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Go to http://groups.yahoo.com/, or to any other yahoo groups page. You may find that you are already recognised. If not, you need to be signed in to see the page.
To sign in, click on "Sign in". You will see boxes for you to enter your ID, and your password. Type these in as prompted. If you click on the little box next to the words "Remember my ID & password" under the ID and password boxes, a tick will appear in it, and you should automatically be recognised when you go to yahoo groups pages. (You should not use this option if you use a computer that you do not log in to, only a Windows 95 or later [or similar] computer that keeps your passwords separate from others users’.)
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If you forget your password, click on the "Sign In" button anyhow, and you will be able to click on a "Trouble signing in?" link – as long as you know your email address (and the birthdate and "Zip code" you entered when you registered with Yahoo! Groups), you will be able to ask Yahoo! to send you your ID and password. More information is available at the Yahoo site.
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Adding, removing, or editing an email address
Changing subscription/delivery options and unsubscribing
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| Check you know your password – you will be prompted for it. (What to do if you've forgotten it.) | ||||||||||||
| Go to your "My Groups" page. | ||||||||||||
| The easiest way to follow the rest of these instructions is to open a new window in
your browser, and to hop between this window, and the one you are working in, using
Alt-tab.
| ||||||||||||
| There are three buttons below the "My Groups" blue bar across the
screen:
| ||||||||||||
| Click on the "Email Preferences" button, and then on the Add/Edit Email Addresses link. Add your new email address. Click on "Finish" to take you back to the "Email Preferences" page. | ||||||||||||
| Your new email address will then appear with "Non-verified" in the status column, and a "verify" link. Click on the "verify" link. An email will be sent to that email address BUT IT OFTEN TAKES SOME TIME BEFORE YOU GET IT, so don't panic! It often takes between 10 minutes and a day or two to arrive. When the email arrives, follow the instructions in the email to verify the email address. Verifying email addresses this way is a pain, but it means that Yahoo! can be sure that you really do want to receive mail from the group, and prevents "Spammers" from signing you up to receive unwanted email. | ||||||||||||
| When you have verified the email, go back to "My Groups" (http://groups.yahoo.com/mygroups). | ||||||||||||
| Next, click on the "Don't see all your groups?" (http://groups.yahoo.com/memwiz) link (which is at the bottom of the "My Groups" page). This will make sure that Yahoo! looks for any groups you might already be signed up to with that email address. If, for example, I've already added your email address to the PHMEG group, the PHMEG group may not appear until you've run the membership wizard. |
| You will then need to change the setup so that your messages are sent to the appropriate email address - see Changing subscription/delivery options and unsubscribing for details on how to do this. |
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You may be a member of several Yahoo! groups. Some options are the same for all of them, and, once registered, you can change your address for all of them in one go. To do this:
| Check you know your password – you will be prompted for it. (What to do if you've forgotten it.) | ||||||||||
| Go to your "My Groups" page. | ||||||||||
| The easiest way to follow the rest of these instructions is to open a new window in
your browser, and to hop between this window, and the one you are working in, using
Alt-tab.
| ||||||||||
| There are three buttons below the "My Groups" blue bar across the screen:
| ||||||||||
| Click on the "Edit My Groups" button. |
| You will then see a table of all the groups you belong to, with information about the way they are configured, and boxes for you to change the email address messages are sent to. |
| If you want all your Yahoogroups messages to go to the same email address you can scroll down to the bottom of the page, where there is a row labelled "Set all of the above to:" Choose your preferred ID and email address by clicking on the triangle next to the "select one" box. Then click on "Save Changes". |
| You should now receive group mail at your preferred email address. |
You can also change your subscription options for individual Yahoo! Groups. To do this for the PHMEG group, go to the group’s home page (e.g. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PHMEG) and click on "Delivery options". You can choose to receive:
| "Individual emails", where you receive a copy of every email message sent to the group; |
| "Daily digest", where you receive a single daily email, with all the emails sent over the previous 24 hours (I find this very hard to follow); |
| "Special notices", where you only receive messages sent by a group moderator as a special notice (i.e. few if any messages at all); or |
| "No email", where you receive no messages from the group. You can still visit the group web site and read the messages there - at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/phmeg/messages for this group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/groupname/messages for other groups). |
You can also unsubscribe from the group at the group home page (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/phmeg or, for other groups, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/groupname).
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You can manage your account by email. The following table lists email commands:
| To: | Send a blank message to: |
| Unsubscribe | phmeg-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com |
| Put your email message delivery on hold | phmeg-nomail@yahoogroups.com |
| Change your subscription to individual emails | phmeg-normal@yahoogroups.com |
| Receive general help information | phmeg-help@yahoogroups.com |
Many list members suffer from over-flowing email inboxes when they return from a period away from the office. There are several solutions to this:
| Not using an "out of office reply" |
| Using an "out of office reply" |
First, PLEASE DO NOT SIMPLY SET UP AN OUT OF OFFICE REPLY (OOR). If you do, all the group members will get your out of office replies. If you need to use an OOR, see below.
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There are several solutions. The simplest is to set your subscription to "no email" until you get back. You can do this at the group's web page, clicking on "Edit my membership", and selecting "No email". You can still read all the messages at the messages page. You can also do this at your "My groups" page, for all of your groups. Click here for instructions if you don't have web access.
Most email software makes it very easy to filter mail into folders, so that you can sort it out at your convenience.
To do this in Outlook, you need to do (or have done) the following:
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Using an OOR can be very useful when you are going to be unavailable for a time. . But, if you are not careful, you can send OORs in response to every email you receive from a mailing list. Doing this on the PHMEG group - and some others - will get you banned from posting, in order to protect other group members from getting lots of OOR messages from you. But it is not difficult to set up your OOR system to avoid this.
| Outlook/Exchange server - setting up rules to prevent sending Out of Office Replies to Yahoo! groups |
| Lotus Groupwise - setting up rules to prevent sending Out of Office Replies to Yahoo! groups |
In Outlook (this has been tested in several versions of Outlook from Outlook 97 to Outlook XP version) you should:
Create a "folder" for moving the files to. For the sake of this "worked example", let’s call it "YahooGroups".
Ensure that you have a mail folder – e.g. your Inbox – selected in Outlook. (If you have e.g. your calendar or contacts folder selected some of the menu items relating to mail will not appear.)
Open the "Out of office assistant" (Click on "Tools", then on "Out of office assistant")
Click on radio button "I am currently out of the office"
Type a message for people who might try to contact you into the box labelled "text of message".
Click on the "Add Rule" button.
Type "*@yahoogroups.com" (without the inverted commas) in the "From" box.
Click on the check box labelled "Do not process subsequent rules" - a tick should be then visible in the box.
Click on the check box labelled "Move to" - a tick should
be then visible in the box - and select the folder you would like the messages moved to,
for you to read when you return.
Click on OK.
When you go away, repeat step 1 above, and check that the rule has a
tick in the box in the "Status" column at the left, and click on the button to
select "I am currently out of the office".
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I have not had a chance to test this, but I have had an opportunity to play with the software on a colleague’s computer. I found it very easy to set up rules, but have not tested them yet; and had to rush off without time to take detailed notes – if anybody can test this and email me (at phmeg-owner@yahoogroups.com) to let me know if it really works, I’d be very grateful.
With Groupwise you need two “rules”:
· a “stop rule processing” rule which runs if a message is received from an address which includes ‘@yahoogroups.com’, and
· an “out of office rule”.
The crucial thing is that the “stop processing rules if…” rule must precede the out of office rule.
To set up the “stop processing rules if…” rule you need to:
· click on Tools|Tools|Rules|New
· Enter a name for the rule, e.g. "Yahoogroups mail"
· Select “Mail items”, where the “from” field “contains “@yahoogroups.com” in the box for “senders name”, and make sure that the option is “includes” (or it might be “contains”), rather than “is [exactly]” (sorry I can’t remember the precise wording, but you should get the gist).
· Click on “Actions”, and select "stop rule processing".
· Drag this rule so that it is ABOVE (i.e. will run before) the out of office reply rule.
I did work out how to set up an out of office reply rule too – it’s easy enough – but I’ll let you work that out for yourselves!
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To ensure that no spam (unsolicited commercial email) is sent to members, Yahoo! Groups has a strict anti-spam policy and takes measures to prevent unsolicited mail.
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This page was last updated on 14/03/2008.
