Emailing previous semester classes
In a previous post, I discussed how to customise your class space and class mailing lists at the U of L. Something I didn’t mention there is that you can email previous semester classes as well, if you know how the mailing list aliases work.
Every current semester class can be emailed by the instructor and his/her delegates at an address in the following format: SUBJNNNNSuleth.ca@, where SUBJ is the four letter subject code for the class (e.g. in most of my cases, engl for English), NNNN is the four digit number (e.g. 3450 in the case of Old English), and S is the section letter (usually a, but could be n for evening classes, or a latter between a and n for additional sections). So in semesters when I am teaching Old English, for example, I can email the class using the address engl3450auleth.ca@.
Obviously this address has to change each semester. The English department, for example, teaches multiple sections of our first year course, English 1900, every semester. That means there is a course that could be referred to as engl1900auleth.ca@ every semester.
To get around this, the university also assigns every class a unique, unchanging email address that can be used to unambiguously contact the class, even when the short address (i.e. the SUBJNNNNS@uleth.ca) has been taken over by another class. This address takes the form YYYYSSSUBJNNNNS@uleth.ca where YYYY is the four digit year the class was taught in, SS is the two digit code for the semester in which it was taught, SUBJ the subject code, NNNN the course number, and S the section letter. So my Fall 2015 Old English class can always be emailed using the address 201503engl3450a@uleth.ca.
The semester codes are very simple, though, because the follow the calendar rather than academic year, a little counter intuitive:
| Semester | Code |
| Fall | 03 |
| Spring | 01 |
| Summer I-III | 02 |
(I confess I’m not quite sure what you do if you teach two sections of a course in consecutive summer semesters).
