The RasMol EMail List


Purpose

Although founded for RasMol, this email list has evolved into a broader discussion of molecular visualization in general, especially molecular visualization in education, and especially with free software (RasMol, Chime, Swiss-PdbViewer, WebLab, etc.). This list is a good place to ask questions about how to use such software most effectively and easily, which software is best for a particular purpose, and to look for announcements of upgrades and new releases of software. Many resources will be made available through the
RasMol Home Page.

Subscribing

To subscribe to the RasMol EMail List, send an email message to this address:

listproc@lists.umass.edu

The body of the message must contain this one line:

subscribe rasmol Your Name, Occupation, Institution, City, Country

for example

subscribe rasmol Eric Martz, Prof, Dept Microbiol, U Mass, Amherst MA US

Please include your occupation, department, institution, city and country, as in the example line above. Abbreviate mercilessly and omit periods to keep the line shorter than 60 characters, else the end will be lost and I'll ask you to resubmit with shorter abbreviation. (The subject line of the message is ignored by the automatic processor. Your email address is obtained automatically and does not need to be typed in. Institution, city, and country are required if they are not evident from your email address.)

Changing your Address

If your email address changes after you subscribe, simply subscribe again from your new address. If you still have your old account, please send an unsubscribe request (see below) from there. If not, please send a request to owner-rasmol@lists.umass.edu asking that your old address be removed. INCLUDE YOUR OLD ADDRESS!

Unsubscribing

To unsubscribe, from the address you wish to unsubscribe send to
listproc@lists.umass.edu this message:

unsubscribe rasmol

Weekly Digests

Those who wish can have all messages for each week delivered concatenated into a single 'digest' message. If you prefer to receive the digest, send to listproc@lists.umass.edu this message:

set rasmol mail digest

To restore delivery to the per-message basis:

set rasmol mail ack

('ack' stands for 'acknowledge' which means that when you send a message to the list, you will receive your own message back as confirmation that the message was broadcast. Don't ask why this is the inverse of digest -- it doesn't make any sense to me either, but it works.)

Broadcasting messages

Before broadcasting a question, search the history of the list to see if the question has already been answered. (Use your browser's Find mechanism -- but wait till the history file has loaded completely before searching.)

To send a message to all subscribers, you must be subscribed, and you must send the message from the address which you subscribed. Address your message to:

rasmol@lists.umass.edu

Do not send 'subscribe' or other commands to this address as they will be sent to all subscribers but otherwise be ignored by the automatic processor.

History by Web

The list history is all past messages sent to the rasmol list. It can be most easily viewed and searched with a web browser at the RasMol EMail List History Site.

History by EMail

If you do not have satisfactory web-browsing capability, you can get a history file by email, but you need to know its name. To find out the names of the history files, send to listproc@lists.umass.edu the message index rasmol -all.

One of the files in the reply might be 95.11 (for November, 1995). To GET this history file, send to listproc@lists.umass.edu the message get rasmol 95.11.

To SEARCH for history files containing a word or phrase, send to listproc@lists.umass.edu the message search rasmol <word or phrase>, for example search rasmol stereo.

Additional information

The rasmol list is managed by a program called listproc. To get more detailed and technical information about its capabilities, send to listproc@lists.umass.edu the message help.

The list is maintained by Eric Martz.