OIT Hosting and Hosting Site Mailing Lists

OIT Hosting and Hosting Site Mailing Lists kp37

OIT is phasing out the Sympa mailing list system and is no longer using it in conjunction with OIT Web Hosting.  There are other solutions for having multiple people get notifications relating to an OIT Web Hosting account, and it may be best to discuss these with your local IT support, who should understand the ins and outs of campus email.

One important thing to note is that the Plesk hosting system will only support a single email address, and cannot handle a comma separated list of multiple addresses.  So, in the hosting management system (found at https://hosting.gatech.edu/), you can only put a single email address in the Notification Email Address for Website field.  If you are the sole site administrator, then just put your email address in this field and you will receive all site notification emails.

The simplest solution for sending notifications to multiple people, although it will typically require the help of your local IT support, is to create an email alias for your site that forwards to all of the site admins, and then enter that alias under Notification Email Address for Website.  

Previous content about Sympa mailing lists is left below for reference until Sympa is completely phased out (date TBD.)


Prior to late 2016, OIT always set up a Sympa mailing list whenever it set up a web hosting account, and the 'hosting.gatech.edu' site automatically managed the membership of that mailing list, syncing the hosting account's administrators and owners to the mailing list.

This process changed with the late 2016 upgrade of 'hosting.gatech.edu'. Previously existing mailing lists remain in place, but new hosting accounts do not get mailing lists created for them, and owners and administrators are no longer synced to the existing mailing lists for existing hosting accounts. Instead, there is now a Notification Email Address for Website field on the hosting record where the site owner or administrator can specify an email address where Plesk server notifications (e.g. your hosting account SSH password is about to expire) can be sent.  The hosting record is viewed and edited by selecting the cogwheel symbol next to the hosting account name on your Plesk Web Admin Tools page.

Here's what you need to know about this new system:

  • If you have a previously existing hosting account and want to keep using the previously existing notifications mailing list, you should open a ticket with OIT and ask them to make you the owner of that Sympa mailing list. Then, you can manually update the mailing list as needed.

  • If you have a new hosting account, you can manually request a Sympa mailing list for the people who will own and administer that account. Once the list has been approved, enter the list's delivery email address into the 'Notification Email Address for Website' field for the associated hosting account.

  • If you don't want to use a Sympa mailing list, you can enter any address into the 'Notification Email Address for Website' field, but it will only accept a single address.  If you want to have it send to more than one person without using a Sympa mailing list, ask your IT support to set up an email alias that points to all of the admins, then enter that alias into the 'Notification Email Address for Website' field.