Subject: Newsletter: Pension-Help Mailing List Established to Support Persons Providing Pension Assistance Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 09:22:29 -0500 ................. BenefitsLink Newsletter ............. { { Free, useful information about U.S. tax and labor laws { and new Internet resources, for employee benefit plan { sponsors, service-providers and participants. ......................................................... _____________________________________________________________ PENSION-HELP MAILING LIST FORMED TO SUPPORT PERSONS WHO PROVIDE PENSION ASSISTANCE The Pension-Help Mailing List has been established as a quick and free way to share questions, tips and information among people and agencies who assist pension plan participants. Anyone with an email account with access to the Internet can participate. The current focus of the mailing list is on helping the helpers, rather than providing a place for participants to pose questions directly. Pension assistance takes many forms -- see if you find yourself described by any of these roles: Level One: General Information Answering technical pension questions Writing publications Making referrals to lawyers, organizations or government agencies Level Two: Obtaining Information Getting documents from government Getting a response from plan Getting a government agency to review a case Level Three: Individualized Review of a Claim Analysis of plan document Analysis of work records Calculation of benefit amounts Analysis of laws, regulations or cases Level Four: Advocacy for a Client Help client present claim or appeal Help client get assistance from government agency Help client track down lost plan Representing client in court The need and desirability of such a mailing list came to light at a conference on pension assistance held in Washington, D.C. in January 1997. The Pension Assistance Summit was organized by the Pension Rights Center of Washington, D.C., with the involvement of several federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, the Internal Revenue Service and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Representatives from approximately 50 different organizations attended the summit. The primary focus of the Pension-Help mailing list is to facilitate communication among persons and agencies who provide pension assistance, rather than being a place where plan participants directly pose questions. * * * * * HOW THE MAILING LIST WORKS The mailing list is operated automatically, through software that runs on a computer connected to the Internet. Anyone who can send and receive email messages via the Internet can subscribe to the mailing list by sending an email to the right address with certain magic words in the text of the message (which is read and processed automatically by the mailing list software). More about subscribing later. List subscribers receive (via email) a copy of every other email message as it is "posted" to the mailing list. (Your mileage may vary, but generally the mailing list software will succeed in delivering email to your Internet email account within a few minutes of the time a message is posted to the mailing list from anywhere in the world.) The number of email messages you'll receive from the Pension-Help mailing list will vary from day to day, depending upon how many other people post messages to the list that day. If you find the number of daily incoming messages to be burdensome, you can subscribe to a version of this mailing list called "Pension-Help-Digest," which contains the same messages but in the form of a single message that is sent to Pension-Help-Digest subscribers once each day. To subscribe to the list: Send an email message to "majordomo@bolis.com" (without the quotes) and put this in the text (body) of the message (not the Subject line): subscribe pension-help you@yourdomain.org (but replace "you@yourdomain.org" with your actual Internet email address). To subscribe to the digest version (once a day) of the list: Send an email message to "majordomo@bolis.com" (without the quotes) and put this in the text (body) of the message (not the Subject line): subscribe pension-help-digest you@yourdomain.org (but replace "you@yourdomain.org" with your actual Internet email address). * * * * * * TERMS OF USE Use of the Pension-Help (or Pension-Help-Digest) mailing list is free. The operation and funding of the mailing list currently is provided by David Rhett Baker, an individual concerned about pension assistance who also operates a commercial employee benefits information site at http://www.benefitslink.com. His email address is erisa@benefitslink.com. Baker is not responsible for the content of the messages that appear on the mailing list and does not review or edit them in any way. If you have any questions about the mailing list, please post them to the list or send email to Baker. ................. BenefitsLink Newsletter ............... { { To unsubscribe: send email to majordomo@benefitslink.com { with "UNSUBSCRIBE newsletter" in the text of the email { without the quotation marks. { { To subscribe: send email to majordomo@benefitslink.com { with "SUBSCRIBE newsletter johndoe@wherever.com" in the { text of the email without the quotation marks, using { your email address rather than johndoe's. { { Your email address is not sold or leased to junk mailers { or any other organization ... no spam, just BenefitsLink! { { To contribute information for publication or to learn { more about sponsoring an issue of the newsletter, please { reply to newsletter@benefitslink.com. { { BenefitsLink is the national employee benefits Web site { at http://www.benefitslink.com -- Dave Baker, Editor.