mailing list

messaging (Often shortened in context to "list") An

electronic mail address that is an alias (or macro, though

that word is never used in this connection) which is expanded

by a mail exploder to yield many other e-mail addresses.

Some mailing lists are simple "reflectors", redirecting mail

sent to them to the list of recipients. Others are filtered

by humans or programs of varying degrees of sophistication;

lists filtered by humans are said to be "moderated".

The term is sometimes used, by extension, for the people who

receive e-mail sent to such an address.

Mailing lists are one of the primary forms of hacker

interaction, along with Usenet. They predate Usenet,

having originated with the first UUCP and ARPANET

connections. They are often used for private

information-sharing on topics that would be too specialised

for or inappropriate to public Usenet groups. Though some

of these maintain almost purely technical content (such as the

Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list), others (like

the "sf-lovers" list maintained for many years by Saul Jaffe)

are recreational, and many are purely social. Perhaps the

most infamous of the social lists was the eccentric bandykin

distribution; its latter-day progeny, lectroids and

tanstaafl, still include a number of the oddest and most

interesting people in hackerdom.

Mailing lists are easy to create and (unlike Usenet) don't

tie up a significant amount of machine resources (until they

get very large, at which point they can become interesting

torture tests for mail software). Thus, they are often

created temporarily by working groups, the members of which

can then collaborate on a project without ever needing to meet

face-to-face.

There are several programs to automate mailing list

maintenance, e.g. Listserv, Listproc, Majordomo.

Requests to subscribe to, or leave, a mailing list should

ALWAYS be sent to the list's "-request" address (e.g.

[email protected] for the IETF mailing list).

This prevents them being sent to all recipients of the list

and ensures that they reach the maintainer of the list, who

may not actually read the list.

[Jargon File]

(2001-04-27)