Would you like to set up an electronic discussion forum for your customers? Or how about a mailing list to announce meetings of your local hobby group? Email is the universal Internet application, which makes mailing lists an ideal vehicle for creating electronic communities. All you need to run a mailing list is access to a system that is connected to the Internet, a mailing list management software package, and a bit of know-how, which is where this book comes in. Managing Mailing Lists is full of practical information for the list maintainer and system administrator alike.
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Mailing List History
The way most people keep up to date on network news is through subscription to a number of mail reflectors (also known as mail exploders). Mail reflectors are special electronic mailboxes which, when they receive a message, resend it to a list of other mailboxes. This in effect creates a discussion group on a particular topic. - E. Krol; The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet; RFC 1118; Sept. 1989. |
Who invented mailing lists? Early forms of mailing lists were invented almost as soon as email was invented. It quickly became apparent that by combining several email addresses together into a single address, one email could be easily sent to a group of people in one action.
The first mailing lists carried on the ARPANET were based on the first email program SNDMSG. Some of the early and most popular mailing lists included the following:
- human-nets. Human factors and their relation to networks.
- network-hackers. Internet programming and protocol issues.
- sf-lovers. Science fiction literature.
- wine-tasters. Wine tasting.
Google Groups has some interesting historical logs of SF-lovers,human-nets, and other ARPANET mailing lists from the early 1980's. In fact, it was these lists that inspired Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott todevelop the Usenet to provide similar functionality for organizations that weren't connected to the ARPANET.
A version of mailing lists was also created on the BITNET network to enable thousands of researchers in organizations around the world to exchange information. BITNET also copied most of their mailing lists to the Usenet newsgroups.
For many years there have been three mailing list software applications that run most mailing lists (see more information at the linked pages):
- Listserv history. Originally conceived by Ira Fuchs and Dan Oberst and implemented by Ricky Hernandez to support BITNET lists. Revised version developed in 1986 by Eric Thomas.
- Majordomo history. First version written by Brent Chapman in about 20 hours. John Rouillard managed it for several versions, and it is now worked on by a free open source software group of developers across the Internet, and maintained by Chan Wilson.
- Listproc history. Listproc was originally developed for Unix computers by Anastasios Kotsikonas ("Tasos") at Boston University in the 1980's. It became very successful, and is now supported by the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN).
Historical applications. There have been many other types of mailing list management software developed over the years, including those listed below:
- Almanac
- BMW
- IDG
- Mailbase
- MReply
- SmartList
- Smof
- TULP
Mailing List Design - List Servers
A mailing list server reads your messages and copies them to everyone subscribed to the list.
Mailing lists are run by computer programs called list servers. Each list server is connected to the email system, and can send and receive email just like a person can, except a lot faster.
Each list server manages two email addresses associated with each mailing list:
- Server address. The server address is used to process administrative commands, such as list subscriptions and unsubscriptions.
- List address. The list address is used for the list itself. When the server receives an email sent to the list address, it automatically copies it to everyone currently subscribed to the list.
There are three main brands of mailing list servers in common use, described in later sections.
- Listserv. One of the most widely used list servers on theInternet, with a commercial version used by many large organizations.
- Majordomo. Widely used in its freeware version by community and small organizations.
- Listproc. Widely used primarily as a commercial product.
There are three general types of mailing lists, each with a different type of operation:
- Unmoderated. These allow any subscriber to send an email to the mailing list for distribution to all subscribers, in real-time without any pre-screening. Most lists are unmoderated.
- Moderated. These lists have a moderator, a human being that checks all email sent to the list to make sure it does not contain inappropriate content before the server distributes it to subscribers. There are more of these lists than there used to be because of problems with spam email, but they usually have fewer members and lower traffic, because it takes a lot of time for a moderator to read and check all of the incoming email on a high traffic list, so the size of a moderated list is somewhat self limiting.
- One-way. These lists are used to distribute information from a central source. Only one person or organization can send email to the list for distribution to all subscribers. These types of lists are often used by organizations to distribute information. There aren't many of these lists, but they often have a very great many members, in some cases hundreds of thousands. A typical example of a one-way list is NewsScan, which sends an email on developments in information technology to subscribers several times a week.
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