Our D-PHYS mailing lists will be offline for maintenance on Thursday 6th June from early morning to approximately 10h00. No emails to @lists.phys.ethz.ch addresses will be accepted during that downtime.

Under the hood, the mailing list software will be migrated from mailman2 to mailman3. After the migration, the web page lists.phys.ethz.ch will have a new look with a modern web interface. You will be able to see and manage all your mailing lists right from the landing page. But note that all other URLs will have a new structure, so any browser bookmarks to individual mailing list configurations or archives will need to be updated.

For users that only receive messages from these mailing lists, nothing should change.

When sending messages to our mailing lists, pay attention, already now, to always use the <somelist>@lists.phys.ethz.ch domain. The obsolete <somelist>@phys.ethz.ch alias exceptions will no longer be accepted after the migration.

Mailing list owners and moderators will be contacted in a separate email with additional information, right after the migration. In particular, the new system will have personal accounts for all users, so that passwords must no longer be shared among list administrators. Also note that any held messages pending for moderation will not be migrated. So please accept or discard moderation requests the day before the migration.

Further documentation is available in our readme.

In light of the recent surge of malware waves, we have decided to quarantine all incoming emails containing Microsoft Office documents with macros enabled - actually, we have been doing so for a week already. Unfortunately way too many of you still open those documents and risk (or succeed in) infecting your computer. Emails containing such dangerous documents will be quarantined and are never shown to the user. Emails with static office documents (no macros) will be delivered unaffected. We're aware of the fact that this policy might create the occasional false positive, but the benefits for all of D-PHYS far outweigh the downside and real use cases for macro documents via email are in fact very rare. In the 8 days of operation so far, we've detected ~850 infected office documents and only 1 false positive. Quarantined emails will be deleted after 30 days, so you have ample time to contact us in case a valid document gets flagged by accident.

Please get in contact if you have any questions.

For some years now we have been providing you with the nice webmail solution of the Roundcube project. Last night they released a new major version which we will install

tomorrow Thursday, August 9, at 07:00.

Note that for about 30 minutes you won't have access to Roundcube. The new version brings a very nice new theme (see screenshot) which we will be enable by default. If for some reason you'd like to keep the old one, you can switch back under Settings -> User Interface -> Interface skin.

Thu 07:15 Upgrade completed.

Until now it was not possible to print on D-PHYS printers while you're on the road with mobile devices. Since several people expressed their interest in such a possibility, we have created two methods that allow you to do just that: read more.
As there's no common standard for mobile printing, certain restrictions apply. If you find yourself with an email that you think should print but doesn't, please let us know.

On Monday, August 2nd, starting at 18:00, we need to modify our LDAP user database to incorporate structural changes needed for a new service we're currently setting up. This will cause a downtime of about 1 h, probably even shorter, that will affect user logins, email and file server access. We will post an update when things are back to normal. Update, 18:30: Things are now back to normal. 🙂

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this service interruption might cause.