Mailing list

Electronic mailing list

An electronic mailing list or email list is a special use of email that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. It is similar to a traditional mailing list – a list of names and addresses – as might be kept by an organization for sending publications to its members or customers, but typically refers to four things:

• a list of email addresses,
• the people ("subscribers") receiving mail at those addresses, thus defining a community gathered around a topic of interest,
• the publications (email messages) sent to those addresses, and
• a reflector, which is a single email address that, when designated as the recipient of a message, will send a copy of that message to all of the subscribers.

Mechanism

Electronic mailing lists usually are fully or partially automated through the use of special mailing list software and a reflector address set up on a server capable of receiving email. Incoming messages sent to the reflector address are processed by the software, and, depending on their content, are acted upon internally (in the case of messages containing commands directed at the software itself) or are distributed to all email addresses subscribed to the mailing list.

A web-based interface is often available to allow people to subscribe, unsubscribe, and change their preferences. However, mailing list servers existed long before the World Wide Web, so most also accept commands over email to a special email address. This allows subscribers (or those who want to be subscribers) to perform such tasks as subscribing and unsubscribing, temporarily halting the sending of messages to them, or changing available preferences – all via email. The common format for sending these commands is to send an email that contains simply the command followed by the name of the electronic mailing list the command pertains to. Examples: subscribe anylist or subscribe anylist John Doe.

Electronic mailing list servers may be set to forward messages to subscribers of a particular mailing list either individually as they are received by the list server, or in digest form, in which all messages received on a particular day by the list server are combined into one email that is sent once per day to subscribers. Some mailing lists allow individual subscribers to decide how they prefer to receive messages from the list server (individual or digest).

History

Mailing lists have first been scholarly mailing lists.{{Cite journal

The "threaded conversation" structure (where the header of a first post defines the topic of a series of answers thus constituting a thread) is a typical and ubiquitous structure of discourse within lists and fora of the Internet. It is pivotal to the structure and topicality of debates within mailing lists as an arena, or public sphere in Habermas wording. The flame wars (as the liveliest episodes) give valuable and unique information to historians to comprehend what is at stake in the communities gathered around lists.{{Cite journal|title=Mailing list archives as useful primary sources for historians: looking for flame wars

Anthropologists, sociologists and historians have used mailing lists as fieldwork.{{Cite journal

List security

On both discussion lists and newsletter lists precautions are taken to avoid spamming.

Companies sending out promotional newsletters, for example, have the option of working with whitelist mail distributors, which agree to standards and high fines from ISPs should any of the opt-in subscribers complain. In exchange for their compliance and agreement to prohibitive fines, the emails sent by whitelisted companies are not blocked by spam filters, which often can reroute these legitimate, non-spam emails.{{Cite web |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161203110906/http://www.bethesda-list.com/lists/what-is-a-whitelist |archive-date= Dec 3, 2016 }}

Subscription

Some mailing lists are open to anyone who wants to join them, while others require an approval from the list owner before one may join. Joining a mailing list is called "subscribing" and leaving a list is called "unsubscribing".

Archives

A mailing list archive is a collection of past messages from one or more electronic mailing lists. Such archives often include searching and indexing functionality. Many archives are directly associated with the mailing list, but some organizations, such as Gmane, collect archives from multiple mailing lists hosted at different organizations; thus, one message sent to one popular mailing list may end up in many different archives. Gmane had over 9,000 mailing list archives as of 16 January 2007. Some popular free software programs for collecting mailing list archives are Hypermail, MHonArc, FUDforum, and public-inbox (which is notably used for archiving the Linux kernel mailing list along with many other software development mailing lists and has a web-service API used by search-and-retrieval tools intended for use by the Linux kernel development community).

Listwashing

Listwashing is the process through which individual entries in mailing lists are to be removed.{{cite news |publisher=InfoWorld |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231218192719/https://www.infoworld.com/article/2639419/reader-voices--aol-clueless-ones.html |archive-date= Dec 18, 2023 }} These mailing lists typically contain email addresses or phone numbers of those that have not voluntarily subscribed. Only complainers are removed via this process. Because most of those that have not voluntarily subscribed stay on the list, this helps spammers to maintain a low-complaint list of spammable email addresses. Internet service providers who forward complaints to the spamming party are often seen as assisting the spammer in list washing, or, in short, helping spammers. Most legitimate list holders provide their customers with listwashing and data deduplication service regularly for no charge or a small fee.

References

References

1. "CONSUMER MARKETING: Magazine Industry on List Security". [[MPA – the Association of Magazine Media]].
2. (June 28, 2022). "Direct Mail or Email? Win Over Donors With Both Channels".
3. "Listserv product history timeline".
4. "How to Set Your Listserv Subscription to Digest Mode".
5. [https://github.com/sympa-community/MHonArc MHonArc - A mail-to-HTML converter]
6. "public-inbox - an "archives first" approach to mailing lists".
7. [https://subspace.kernel.org/software.html kernel.org: What is subspace running?]
8. "public-inbox listing".
9. Corbet, Jonathan. (December 13, 2021). "Digging into the community's lore with lei". [[LWN.net]].
10. Ryabitsev, Konstantin. (November 5, 2021). "lore+lei: part 1, getting started".
11. Ryabitsev, Konstantin. (November 12, 2021). "lore+lei: part 2, now with IMAP".
12. in the United States, via the Federal DO-NOT-CALL registry, 888-382-1222