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A mailing list lets you share information via e-mail with many people, usually on a specific topic or for a specific purpose. Just like a magazine, you choose to be part of a mailing list by subscribing to the list. It is then sent to you. The Bistro discussion forum for this course is more like a newsgroup than a mailing list.
A subscriber sends a message to the mailing list's e-mail address. This same message is then re-distributed to all of the people subscribed to the list. Most lists let you choose whether to receive each email individually or to receive a digest. The digest can go out periodically or when the backlog has grown to a certain size.
I subscribe to the web-design list. It's very active, so I get it in digest form. Two or three times a day, I get an email that's about 32 kb in size.
Because mailing lists have their origins in the academic community, many mailing lists are about academic and research-oriented topics. However, many mailing lists exist for non-academic topics as well. Topica will get you started with the tens of thousands. Its web forms let you easily subscribe and unsubscribe.
Many lists have one person managing it. You subscribe by emailing the list manager.
For example, Market-l is a mailing list that gets 2,000 postings a month. Many of them are "me toos" or rants that you can pass over. To subscribe, send an e-mail to mail@amic.com, and write
subscribe market-l
in the body of the message. Don't put anything else because a machine is going to process it and the machine will try to interpret your polite thank-you as a command. The machine's not real bright.
You'll soon get an email response and soon after that you'll start getting the list's mail. If the list's manager gives you a digest option, I recommend that you use it. You'll get one email every day or so that has a table of contents and all the messages one after another.
Topica has concise introductory material about the history of organized email, the technology that makes it work, and the common-sense rules -- called netiquette -- that keep it civil.
http://www.topica.com/help/index.html
Managing a mailing list can be a lot of work -- for example, keeping track of all the messages that are received and sent, and keeping track of who subscribes to the list and who quits and who just changed email addresses.
List owners frequently use software that automates the management of these mailing list functions. The three common mailing list management programs:
LISTSERV
Majordomo
ListProc
At LSoft,
you can browse brief summaries and subscribe to those lists with topics of
interest to you. Guaranteed: you click on a few of these and your mail box will
never be empty!
LISTSERV is so popular that mailing lists in general are often called listservs.
Other than when you subscribe and unsubscribe, the three list-management
programs behave the same and you won't notice or care which one the list owners
use.
Administrative requests -- a request to be added to the list, dropped from the list, or asking for an index of messages that have been sent to the list -- are sent to the list's administrative address.There may be a person on the other end of this address, but most often administrative requests are received and interpreted by LISTSERV, Majordomo, or ListProc.
For example, I recently heard about a new list called E-CARM for discussions of electronic commerce. I got the address at Florida State and learned that they used ListProc. So I sent an email -- not to E-CARM but to ListProc:
Because my email was going to a machine and not a person, I didn't bother with the howdies and intros. In fact, they would confuse the machine. In the message area I wrote:
subscribe e-carm Douglas Anderson
Almost immediately, I received this return email from ListProc.
Subj: SUBSCRIBE E-CARM DOUGLAS ANDERSON
Date: 98-02-09 08:20:32 EST
From: listproc@lists.fsu.edu
Sender: listproc@lists.fsu.edu
Reply-to: listproc@lists.fsu.edu
To: dougand@aol.com
Subscription requests are not automatic for this list. Your request has been
forwarded to judiemul@kc-inc.net for approval.
Fifteen minutes later, I received another email. Here's the first part; the rest is below. Note that it's coming from Majordomo.
Subj: Welcome to e-carm
Date: 98-02-09 08:34:58 EST
From: Majordomo@c3po.kc-inc.net
Reply-to: Majordomo@c3po.kc-inc.net
To: dougand@aol.com
--
Welcome to the e-carm mailing list!
Please save this message for future reference. Thank you.
If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list, you can send mail to
<Majordomo@lists.kc-inc.net> with the following command in the body of
your email message:
unsubscribe e-carm
or from another account, besides dougand@aol.com:
unsubscribe e-carm dougand@aol.com
If you ever need to get in contact with the owner of the list, (if you have
trouble unsubscribing, or have questions about the list itself) send email to
owner-e-carm@lists.kc-inc.net .
This is the general rule for most mailing lists when you need to contact a
human.
Contact Info:
Judie Mulholland <judiemul@kc-inc.net>
Rajiv Kaushik <rkaushik@admin.fsu.edu>
List Moderators
[Last updated on: Fri Feb 6 11:50:56 1998]
You would not have this kind of contact with a newsgroup; the newsgroup is more likely to have a FAQ that covers the information in the rest of Judie and Rajiv's email.
The other address is for the mailing list itself. This is the address to which you send messages for dissemination to the entire mailing list. You can, of course, also reply directly to the author of the message.Some lists are moderated. This means that each message is reviewed by a human to ensure that it is appropriate and in keeping with the purposes of the list before it is redistributed to the list's subscribers. The moderator tends to delete spam before the list members see it.Even though the moderator is there, you should follow the same advice I gave you for newsgroups: lurk, read the FAQ, don't shoot from the hip.
Some lists are restricted -- subscriptions to the list are not
available to the public. For example, some police mailing lists require a badge
number and a check with the officer's local supervisor.Still other lists are
completely open: they are unmoderated, open to anyone, and a person does not
have to subscribe in order to send messages to the list.
Judie and Rajiv are doing a great service -- unpaid, time-consuming, and
generally thankless -- for the community of folks interested in electronic
commerce. In addition to the subscribe / unsubcribe info, their welcoming email
also included the following on E-CARM's purpose and on netiquette in general.
Note that they are declaring the list unmoderated. I take that to mean that if everyone stays on topic, they'll be happy to let the majordomo software do all the work. If the time comes (as indeed it did often in the two weeks after I subscribed) when they need to intervene a little, they will. Meanwhile, here's what the want new subscribers to know.
... the rest of the introductory email from above
For hundreds of years, librarians have been responsible for
classifying, cataloguing, indexing and retrieving information, but the true
value of these tasks didn't become manifest until computers came into widespread
use. Likewise, with the advent of the world wide web and e-commerce, the need to
actively and aggressively manage a wide spectrum of rights (privacy, access,
free-speech, copyright, trademarks / secrets, patents, etc.) -- regardless of
whether they are derived from statute, contract, or convention -- is now coming
to the fore.
Against this backdrop, it is the aim of E-CARM to serve as a forum where we can
discuss issues related, but not limited, to:
* secure transactions
* the use of digital signatures and certificates for signing documents
* competing rights management models
* the challenges posed by the buying and selling of intangible goods
* supporting technologies and approaches for enabling e-commerce,
e.g. ECMS, watermarking, cryptolopes, smart cards, EDI, etc.
* measurement and accountability
* interoperability
* the development of standards
While the list is open to all interested parties, ideally, we would like to see
the bulk of the discussions directed towards managers and administrators who
will be responsible for the implementation of new technological approaches into
their current business/administrative practices.
In short, E-CARM has been set up in order to provide an opportunity for the
exchange of ideas, opinions and information. While we do not permit advertising
per se, the list may be used for announcements of events, products / services,
publications, proposals, new sites / reports / initiatives, pending legislation,
and so on.
Given the fact that the issues raised by this list should be of interest to a
global audience, we would like to point out that while English as the language
of discussion may predominate, we would encourage anyone who feels more
comfortable expressing themselves in their native language to do so and the rest
of us will do our best to accommodate you.
Finally, it is our hope that the discussions taking place on E-CARM will not
only stimulate ideas for innovative approaches to e-commerce and rights
management, but when taken as a whole, they will become an invaluable resource
to the pioneers and practitioners who are endeavoring to bring about a paradigm
shift that will usher in a new world order.
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