### Communities as shared mailing lists

Communities may also be used as shared email distribution lists: By default, every community member has the right to send email messages to the whole community. Of course, also the members of the associated community workspace may send email messages to the community.

You send an email message to a community as follows:

• Go to the members’ page of the community workspace by clicking on the icon shown in the ‘Share’ column of the community workspace entry.

• Select Send to Email in the action menu of the community. This will present the ‘Send Email’ form with the community email address already inserted into the ‘To:’ field. Alternatively, you may also use (Send Email) in the multi-selection toolbar.

Note that (Email) in the multi-selection toolbar may not be used for sending email messages to communities, because this action sends the email message from your local email client to the BSCW server for distribution. BSCW servers, however, cannot distribute received email messages currently.

When you plan to use a community as shared mailing list, the admission policy should be hidden or closed and the community role should not include the right to invite or remove members, so that you can control community membership. As community role you should choose, e.g., Associate member, but not Member (includes right to destroy the whole community) or Manager (includes right to manage community membership).