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GTONET EMAIL LISTS |
An introduction to "mailing lists"
Electronic mail is still the most-used service in the Internet, and not the WWW, as one might expect. It is used for casual conversations between people all over the world, for discussions of all kind of topics, for transmitting data files through the net or for distributing information amongst colleagues in a world-wide company. Even in Intranets electronic mail is very useful, because it is quick, easy to archive and reliable.
Electronic mail is not limited to conversations between only two peers. A mail may have several recipients unlike a paper letter. Hence, discussions between groups of people can be held with this media easily. Everybody sends the mail to all persons involved in the discussion and everybody can reply in a way that all others see his text, too.
For larger groups of people, though, this becomes inconvenient. When exchanging e-mail in a larger group of recipients, people tend to accidently forget persons in the list of recipients, they send their replies to the wrong person, they have to keep their aliases up-to-date for the mail to reach the person, etc...
To remedy these shortcomings, the idea of the mailing list was developed. A mailing list is hosted on a central server, which has the addresses of the people who are on that mailing list. Then a special account is created, called the mailing list address, to which people can send the mail they want to be distributed to all receivers. |
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The Mailing List Server
The machine accepts the mail, looks up the list of addresses in the list, and re-sends the mail to all those people. If one of the persons on the list wants to reply to a mail he or she has received via the mailing list, he or she sends the reply to the mailing list address again and it is automatically distributed among all recipients again.
The list of addresses on the machine hosting the mailing list is called the list of subscribers and a person who is on that list is consequently called a mailing list subscriber. The process of sending an e-mail to the special address with the intention to get it distributed to all subscribers is called posting to a list.
Advantages of "mailing lists"
The advantage of this setup is that each subscriber only has to know the address of the mailing list and not all the addresses of all the subscribers. In fact, a subscriber doesn't even have to know who is subscribed to the mailing list at all.
Imagine the company you're working for would have a mailing list where all employees are subscribed with their current e-mail address. The mailing list address would then be, say, ``all-employees@enterprise.com". If you'd like to inform all your colleagues about an important happening, you'd simply send an e-mail to that address and everybody would receive it. If a person leaves the company, or a new employee comes to the company, only the list of subscribers on the mailing list server has to be updated and everything would work fine.
Basically, this is what a mailing list server does: It is nothing more than a program that stores a list of addresses, receives mail under a special mailing list address and then re-sends the mail to all subscribers.
Of course you're not limited to one mailing list, you can host as many as you like. Not only a list for all employees, but also discussion forums for the management of the company, for all members of a certain department or all the left-handers. Privately, you can use mailing lists to discuss your favourite hobby with other interested people, you can spread basketball statistics or the latest version of a program all the subscribers are using. There's no limitation. Whenever a group of people has to exchange electronic mail on a regular basis, a mailing list is a good way to do it.
Further automatization
As you can probably imagine, the task of keeping the list of subscribers up-to-date becomes a bit difficult when the number of subscribe addresses grows beyond a few dozen, because people tend to change their e-mail addresses from time to time, for various reasons. On a mailing list for a thousand subscribers from all over the world, the maintainer of the list would probably spend most of his time editing the list file, removing or adding addresses.
That is why GTONET allows people to do that themselves. Additionally to the part that re-sends the mail to all subscribers, there's a program included in the package that understands a number of commands, like ``subscribe" or ``unsubscribe".
If you want to have your address added to a mailing list, you do not contact the maintainer of the list, but you send an e-mail to GTONET and put the command ``subscribe" into the mail. GTONET will then add your address to the list automatically. Not only is this easier and more convenient for you, it is also a lot faster. Usually, GTONET will process a subscription request for a mailing list in a tenth of a second, 24 hours a day, while a human maintainer of the list would probably need several hours or even days to cope with the incoming e-mail.
Similarly you can remove your address from a mailing list, or you can change the address you are subscribed under within a few moments and no human interaction is required.
Why every mailing list two addresses...
So how does this work? It's very easy in fact: The command interpreter of the mailing list server has a special address, too. This is the name of the list, with the text ``-request" append to it. All e-mails directed to this account will be processed by the server. If, for example, you want to subscribe to a mailing list with the name ``basketball", which has the address ``basketball@gtonet.net", you'd send an e-mail to the address ``basketball-request@gtonet.net" and put the word ``subscribe" in the body of the mail.
GTONET would then receive the mail a few moments later, process it, add your address to the list of subscribers and send you a short recipt back to let you know that your subscription was successful.
It is very important that you know the difference between the address of the mailing list itself, and the program that is maintaining the list of addresses. If you'd write your mail to "basketball@gtonet.net" -- to stick with our example -- instead of "basketball-request@gtonet.net", your command would not be processed by the server but would be re-sent to all subscribers. This is a common mistake beginners make and it is a particular annoying one, because the subscribers are bothered with the useless article on the list, and secondly, because the person who tried to subscribe will not get what he or she wanted: To be subscribed to the list.
Different types of a mailing list
The type of mailing list we have described so far is known as a public mailing list. That is a list that is open to everyone to subscribe. Opposed to that is a closed mailing list. That is a mailing list where only certain people may subscribe or where every subscription requests needs the approval of the list maintainer to succeed.
The public mailing list is widely used in the Internet for all kind discussion forums, while a closed mailing list is typically used by companies or organizations for maintaining internal forums, that are not meant for everybody. GTONET can maintain both kind of lists, of course, and a number of variations between the public and the closed list, so it will usually suit your needs just fine.
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