There are many public
mailing lists out there, 90 thousand + last time I checked.
In addition, there are many private lists such as our class
list. In general the public lists fall into two categories,
discussion lists and information lists. With the former,
groups of people with like interests exchange messages. The
latter are one way, much like newsletters.
Mailing lists are among the most useful tools to be found on
the Net. Yes, it does take some effort to find the "right"
lists. However once done you can easily and economically exchange
ideas, with people all over the world. Think about it. This is no
small asset.
Another virtue of mailing-lists is that they are easy to join and
easy to leave. Further, the mechanism is such that a single message
to a list is automatically distributed to all members of the list,
be it 10 or 10,000. In addition, control commands can be sent to
the mailing-list's computer to "make the elephant dance".
Of course when we talk about mailing lists, we are actually talking about
server side mailing list management software (MLMs). The major MLMs
programs are List Servers (listserv), Majordomo Processors (majordomo)
and List Processors (listproc). Here at the school we use
"listproc."
Another format for mailing lists is becoming popular, Web based. One of
the more popular ones is
eGroups.
Ok so how do we find that list of our dreams? Just checkout
the database at
Liszt.com or
Tile.net or
Meta-List.net.
BTW did you notice that Tile.Net includes
information on FTP lists, vendors and Newsgroups. Neat, isn't
it? Serendipity at work! We will examine these topics shortly.
In each cases, Liszt, Tile, and Meta-List you can either use
a search engine or you can "browse" through the list.
At this time it is not clear if eGroup and other Web based forums
are being cataloged in the same manner as the traditional
lists. So it might be well directly check eGroup.
Please note that there is a distinct addressing difference when sending
commands to the mailing-list's computer and when sending messages to the
list's recipients.
You address the computer as:
You address the list's recipients as:
Take care, you don't want to send a computer command to 10,000 list recipients. They get testy. Again, Web based forums use different rules, often requiring Web access for 'adjustments.'
An exercise for students: Find, join, and report (200 words) on a list.
You distance folks send your response to our class mailing list. An exercise for students: I do like chili. Everybody, find a Chili or is it Chile or perhaps Chilli lovers list? Send your "finds" to our mailing list. As you will note, at Sam McGee's site, there are also useful Web based forums. |
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