Mailing Lists

An electronic mailing list is simply a list of email addresses to which the same information is being sent. They are a simple electronic means of discussion that works entirely through email.

When you want to contribute to the discussion, you send out a single message which is then distributed to all the other members.

GNU Mailman is software that lets you manage electronic mailing lists. It supports a wide range of mailing list types, such as general discussion lists and announce-only lists. Mailman has extensive features which make it good for list subscribers: easy subscription and unsubscription, privacy options, and the ability to temporarily stop getting posts from the list

Mailman has two different interfaces for the list subscriber: the web interface and the email interface.

Web Interface List information (listinfo) page is found at http://WEBSERVER/mailman/listinfo/LISTNAME

(for example, IT Mailing List can be found at http://lists.uchastings.edu/mailman/listinfo/it)

The listinfo page is the starting point for the subscriber interface. It contains information about the LISTNAME list. Usually all the other subscriber pages can be accessed from this point, so you really only need to know this one address.

Some common terms used here:

post - typically denotes a message sent to a mailing list. (Think of posting a message on a bulletin board.)

members - people who are part of an electronic mailing list; also called subscribers.

list administrators - people in charge of maintaining that list. Lists may have one or more administrators.

list moderators - people in charge of reading posts and deciding if they should be sent on to all subscribers.

site administrator - person who maintains the software that runs all the electronic mailing lists on a machine. Often the site administrator also administrates individual lists.

A request to create a new Mailman list can be sent to noblee@uchastings.edu

For more information about mailman please visit http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/