Internet Mailing Lists


A mailing list is a distribution of electronic mail messages to a set list of recipients from a central point. A mailing list manager maintains a subscriber list. A list may or may not be moderated. If not, when a subscriber (or for some lists, when anyone) sends a message to the mailing list manager, this message is posted to everyone on the subscriber list. If the list is moderated, the moderator decides whether to approve messages sent to the mailing list manager. Subscriptions of a mailing list may also be open to everyone, or subscriptions may be restricted by the mailing list manager. All this is accomplished via a mailing list management program, such as LISTSERV (see http://www.lsoft.com/listserv.stm) and Majordomo (see http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/). Each mailing list also has an administrative address. Messages are sent to this address when someone wants to subscribe or unsubscribe to the list, or make other changes to their subscription.

Mailing lists number in the tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands, and they exist on a tremendous variety of subjects. With so many mailing lists, you may wonder how you might find those that could be of interest to you. Fortunately, there are excellent ways to find mailing lists on particular subjects. One excellent way to find mailing lists is to use CataList, the mailing list directory web site, at http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html. Using CataList, you can do keyword searches to find mailing lists or browse through lists by category CataList knows about more than 74,000 different public mailing lists.

Subscribing and Unsubscribing to a Mailing List

Once you find a mailing list that might include messages of interest to you, you can subscribe to it. To subscribe to a mailing list, you send a command to the administrative address for that mailing list, putting this command as a line in an e-mail message. For mailing lists that use the LISTSERV mailing list software, this command needs to be in the form

 subscribe listname your name 

where listname is the name of the list and your name is your actual name, not your e-mail address. For mailing lists that use Majordomo, you do not include your name on this line.

Often you will find that you are not as interested in the messages posted to a particular mailing list as you thought you might be, or you just find yourself swamped with messages. If this is the case, you might decide to unsubscribe to the mailing list. To do this, on the first line of an e-mail message send the command

 signoff listname 

if the mailing list uses LISTSERV software or the command

 unsubscribe listname 

if the mailing list uses Majordomo list management software.

Caution 

Many people try to subscribe or unsubscribe to a mailing list by sending a message to the list address rather than the administrative address. Never do this, because all this does is post your message (subscribe or unsubscribe) to everyone on the list!

If you cannot find a mailing list that meets your needs, because the subject of interest is not addressed, because of a clutter of too many messages, or some other reason, you may want to start you own mailing list. There are several ways to start and run your own mailing list. You can install a mailing list management program on your computer. (Refer to the web sites for LISTSERV and Majordomo to find out more about this option.) If this option does not appeal to you, you might want to use a mailing list hosting service that charges a fee. For more information about this option, consult Internet: The Complete Reference, listed at the end of this chapter.




UNIX. The Complete Reference
UNIX: The Complete Reference, Second Edition (Complete Reference Series)
ISBN: 0072263369
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 316

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