Mailing Lists Tutorial

Mailing Lists: Virtual Communities.

Joining an Internet Mailing List can be very valuable, or very frustrating. With a few guidelines, you will be able to get the most out of your Internet use.

Background Info:

A "mailing list" (or "distribution list") is a collection of e-mail addresses. E-mail is sent out to all of the addresses on this list. The character of these lists varies widely depending on the people who subscribe, or the policy of the people allowed to post messages to the list.

There are mailing lists for engineers, mailing lists for sports fans, mailing lists for computer hackers. There is a mailing list for people who are interested in suicide prevention.

You can see that there is a HUGE world on mailing lists out there. The best way to gain some experience, is to subscribe to a list!

Some Questions to Ask Yourself:

How many postings per day are there on average?
A high volume list can have hundreds of messages per month. This is useful for organizations that must consume a lot of information.
How many posting per day can I realistically read?
This is really a personal choice question. How much time do you want to spend reading e-mail? Will you read all of it, or delete most of it?
Is the list moderated?
A list is moderated if one person (or a small committee) decides which messages will be posted to the list. There are good reasons to have moderated lists, and there are good reasons to have unmoderated lists. You would want to have moderated lists when you only want mail that has been approved in some sense. You would want to have an unmoderated list when you want each member of this virtual community to have a voice.

Joining a List:

The way that you join a mailing list depends on the list. You might have to send e-mail to the owner of the list. These addresses often look something like owner-listname@hostname.xyz (where listname is replaced by the actual name of the list) or listname-request@hostname.xyz

Often mailing lists are automated. You communicate with the list controller by sending e-mail to it (Yes, you are actually sending e-mail to a computer program!). You will often be required to send a special message either in the subject or the body of your message, like subscribe listname. Also, if you get confused using this kind of automated server, you can very often send e-mail with a subject or body of help or help listname.

Getting Off of a Mailing List List:

The first thing you should do once you have joined a list, is figure out how to unsubscribe from it. If you start getting too much e-mail, you'll want to reclaim your mailbox from the storm of e-mail you are getting. If the list is automated, you will be able to send an e-mail command like putting unsubscribe in the subject or body of the message.

BE AWARE THAT EACH LIST MIGHT HAVE A DIFFERENT WAY OF SUBSCRIBING, AND UNSUBSCRIBING and all should be fine.

Here's an example to get you started. There is a mailing list called EDUPAGE. You join it by sending an e-mail message to listproc@educom.edu with the following in the body of the message:

subscribe edupage YourFirstName YourLastName

To unsubscribe, you would send an e-mail to listproc@educom.edu with:

unsubscribe edupage in the message body.

To see this list processors help file try sending listproc@educom.edu a note with the word help on a single line by itself in the message body.

Huge List of Mailing Lists!

Here is a compilation of publically available mailing lists. Browse though the index to see if any of the lists interest you, and subscribe!