Hello fellow List owners and Help Desk consultants:

I am writing to seek your sage wisdom  on an issue which is becoming more and
more  of  a  problem  here  at   Temple  University.  I  am  responsible  for
maintaining our  L-Soft Listserver here.  Listserv has become a  very popular
medium  for instructional  purposes. We  have  many lists  which are  created
either to supplement traditional in-class  discussions or to replace in-class
meetings entirely.

The vast majority  of Temple's students commuters who visit  campus only when
necessary although there  are long-range efforts to change  that. The problem
I want  to discuss here  is the process for  finding out what  each student's
e-mail address is for  those students who are enrolled in  a course where the
instructor  uses a  Listserv list.  The instructors  prefer to  subscribe the
students to their respective lists so that  the students don't need to do so.
This is done  so that students can  receive each message that is  sent to the
list. The problem  is in finding out which student  has which e-mail address.

We have no centralized e-mail address  database here, although we are nearing
the end  of the development  of such a database.  This database should  be in
production  soon,  but  it  will  be strictly  voluntary.  Many  of  Temple's
students  live outside  the  metropolitan  calling area  so  they access  the
Internet at their own  expense through any number of private  ISPs. We do not
recommend any particular ISP for students who have to pay a toll to dial into
Temple's computer  network. Accounts on  computers at Temple are  also spread
over several  different systems, most of  which are DEC Alphas.  Students can
opt  to get  a  Unix shell  account,  with PPP  service too,  on  any of  our
centrally managed systems.  The usernames can be whatever  the student wants,
for the  most part. Some  students can  also opt to  get an account  on their
department's system.  Many of the  departmental systems  do not run  a finger
daemon or anything like that.

Registration for courses  is done via an automated voicemail  system which is
not  designed  to  record  student's   e-mail  addresses.  As  such,  I  have
absolutely no tools for gathering this information.

Does  anyone  else  operate  course-based  Listserv lists  in  this  kind  of
unstructured environment? If so, how to  you deal with the problem of finding
students' e-mail  addresses so that  their instructors can subscribe  them to
their  courses' Listserv  lists? With  nearly 600  lists under  my direct  or
indirect care, this issue is getting to  the point where what little sanity I
have left is rapidly fading so any and all ideas are welcome!


  Stan  Horwitz  Internet: [log in to unmask]  Bitnet:  STAN@TEMPLEVM
  Temple University  -- Senior  Consultant (My  views are  all mine!)
  Manager of the Help-Net and Suggest lists and Listserv Postmaster.