Skip to main content

University IT Branded Emails

Create an email

  1. Go to uit-mailer.stanford.edu
  2. Go to Content > Add Content and click UIT News.
  3. Fill in the fields.
    • Under Email category, select one of these options:
      • UIT News - from OCIO (OCIO-branded)
      • UIT News - from University IT (UIT-branded)
      • UIT Community
      • Stanford General (Stanford-branded)
    • The Subject and From fields are required.
      • In the From: Email address field, list uit-announcement@lists.stanford.edu to show that it is a UIT email.
    • Fill in the Reply-To fields.
      • In most cases you should include a Reply-To: Name and Reply-To: Email that goes to the project team that requested the email, so that people can contact the project team with questions.
      • If you want people to be able to reply to the Comms team, enter  uit-announcement@lists.stanford.edu in the From: field.
      • If you don't want any replies, enter  announce@stanford.edu in the From: field.
        Note: Jim uses noreply@stanford.edu in the Reply-To: Email field when he doesn't want replies.
    • The Message is the content of the email. Note: Only copy/paste plain text in to the body field — not doing so may result in text that is not uniform throughout the email. You can convert rich text to plain text by using TextEdit or a similar program.
  4. Click Save.
  5. After it's saved, a Send Email tab appears. Click the Send Email tab to send the email.

NOTE: Usually, the Text Format chosen by default will be fine. In some cases, when you need some special HTML formatting (e.g. tables with colored headers) you might need to select the Full HTML text format, save and then send the email.

Images

If you want to use images in your emails, upload them using the images field and then make sure the src of the img tag does not have the uit-mailer.stanford.edu domain.

<img src="/sites/default/files/foo.png">

If you include the uit-mailer.stanford.edu domain in the src the image will not load as uit-mailer is not set up to serve images. On the other hand, if you omit the domain, UIT Mailer will recognize that it's a local image and send it as an attachment.

Send a test email

  1. When you're ready to send a test email email, click the Send Email tab.
  2. Your email address is automatically pre-filled. Click Submit.

Prepare the mailing list

If you are sending to individual email addresses, you'll want to use a mailing list that's been set up for this purpose:

uit-announcement-recipients@lists.stanford.edu

— This email list can be used when you have a list of individual email addresses you will use for a one-time mailing or when you want to combine multiple email lists into a single email list. Combining multiple email lists into a single email list on Mailman prevents people on several email lists from receiving the same email multiple times. Contact a senior member of the team if you need assistance using email lists.

  1. Visit https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/admin/uit-announcement-recipients (if you don't have access contact a senior member of the team).
  2. Click Membership Management to see if there are members in this list already. If so, clear the membership list:
  3. Click Mass Removal
    1. Select "No" for Send unsubscription acknowledgement to the user?
    2. Select "No" for Send notifications to the list owner?
    3. Select "Yes" for Empty the list?
    4. Click Submit Your Changes
  4. Click Membership List and verify that the list is empty.
  5. Prepare your new list of subscribers. What you'll need is a regular text file with a list of addresses, each on a separate line by itself. If you received an Excel file with a list of email addresses, copy them out of Excel into a text file. If you have more than a thousand email addresses, let Marco know and he can populate the mailing list in a different way as the following method can take quite some time for very large lists. 
  6. Click Mass Subscription 
    1. Select "Subscribe" for Subscribe these users now or invite them?
    2. Select "No" for Send welcome messages to new subscribees?
    3. Select "No" for Send notifications of new subscriptions to the list owner?
    4. Click Choose File and select the file you prepared above.
    5. Click Submit Your Changes
    6. You'll receive a confirmation of all the email addresses that were subscribed. Scroll to the bottom for email addresses that were rejected as bad or invalid. Sometimes there is an obvious typo and you can go back to Mass Subscription and add them manually by typing them in the first text box.

Add the sender to the approved list (was: Release the email)

New: it looks like the following also applies to the Reply-To field. Anna ran into an issue where the Reply-to address was also a moderated member and the email bounced back.

Emails from non-approved senders will be automatically rejected. If the sender's email (what you entered in From:) is not in the list of approved senders, visit the list administration page at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/admin/uit-announcement-recipients/privacy/sender and add the email address of the sender under List of non-member addresses whose postings should be automatically accepted.

If the sender of the email is also a member of the list (rare, but could happen) you will need to turn off their moderation. Find their email address using Find member on this page: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/admin/uit-announcement-recipients/members and then uncheck the mod checkbox.

Note: If you are sending to multiple email lists or the mailing list you are using includes other lists as subscribers, you might have to repeat the same process to release the email on those other lists. If you don't have access to those lists, you'll need to rely on their admins, or ask Marco.

Send your email

  1. When you're ready to send your email, click the Send Email tab.
  2. Put in the real email address (e.g. uit-announcement-recipients@lists.stanford.edu) you wish to send the email to and click Submit. 

Update the global Reply-to: field

Updating the global Reply-to: field applies to all emails that do not have their own Reply-to: values.

  1. Go to https://uit-mailer.stanford.edu/admin/config/services/simplenews/replyto
  2. Fill in the fields and click Save configuration.

Adding a new Newsletter Type

  1. Go to https://uit-mailer.stanford.edu/admin/config/services/simplenews and click Add newsletter category
  2. Enter a Name and Description
  3. Under Subscription Settings
    1. Select "None" for Subscribe new account
    2. Select "Hidden" for Opt-in/out method
    3. Uncheck Subscription Block
  4. Under Email Settings
    1. Select "HTML" for Email Format
    2. Select "none" for Email priority
    3. Uncheck Request receipt
  5. ​​Under Sender Information, enter a From name (e.g. University IT Announce) and an From email address (e.g. announce@stanford.edu)
  6. Under Newsletter Subject, replace the Email subject with [node:title]
  7. Under HTML to Text Conversion, select Display hyperlinks inline with the text
  8. Hit Save
  9. Go to https://uit-mailer.stanford.edu/admin/config/services/simplenews and click edit newsletter category for the category you just entered.
  10. Look at the URL and you'll see the ID of the newsletter category right before the word "edit".  (e.g. .../services/simplenews/categories/2/edit). Make a note of that ID as it will be used to name the templates in the Stanford News theme.
  11. Connect to uitcomm-web-03 and create two new files in the directory /var/www/uit-mailer/sites/all/themes/stanford_news named simplenews-newsletter-body--X.tpl.php and simplenews-newsletter-footer--X.tpl.php, replacing X with the ID found in the URL above. Look in the theme for examples of what these files should look contain.
  12. If there are any images referenced in the template, use Drupal to upload the image file.  Do not upload the image file manually.
  13. Update the read/write permissions of the template files.
    sudo chmod 640 simplenews-newsletter-body--X.tpl.php
    sudo chmod 640 simplenews-newsletter-footer--X.tpl.php
  14. Clear Drupal site cache to activate the new template.
  15. Backup templates and images in https://code.stanford.edu/uit-comm/stanford_news 
Last modified