MAILING LIST TUTOURIAL

Electronic Conferences

E-conferences are discussion groups organized around interests, shared work/research, hobbies, scholarly topics, or other experiences or themes. Clearly these categories are in the eye of the subscriber. Mailing lists are a sort of "electronic round robin" in which a group of correspondents exchange e-mail. As each individual member of the group[list] posts, all subscribers receive a copy. This is done by the automated listsever software on a node. The listserver[computer] acts as a defacto moderatour -though often a person also augments this task. By distributing mail to a list, time, and money is saved, not to mention the huge amounts of bandwidth.

E-conferences are maintained by various software, some of the most common being Bitnet, Listserv, Unix Listserv, Mailbase, Mailserv, and Majordomo. All these software explode individual member's postings back to the entire membership, or list of subscibers. Posts arrive as regular mail and are read with whatever mail software package is loaded on your machine. E-mail messages to be distributed to the membership of that conference should be sent to that conference, eg.:

To subscribe to a given e-conference or to address any other technical [or "electronic-accounting"] aspect of the conference (index, subscriber list, etc), mail must be sent to the LISTSERVER, the computer which circulates the list.

Unless otherwise indicated, to find out subscription information regarding one the lists discussed in JUiC, send the message, "information " to the shamash listprocessour. [NB: Shamash is moving from nysernet.org to a new ISP, and normal response times may be delayed.] The listprocessour will respond with an email message outlining the focus/purpose of the list, moderatour -if any, where archives are to be found, and subscription information. To subscribe to a mail list send the below standard message:

The listserver will respond with a message saying that you have been added to the llist of subscribers of that your request has been passed on to the the list's moderator. Some lists require a confirmation code. On addition to the list, you will initially receive a rather lengthy introduction message from the listprocessour/moderatour. SAVE THIS MESSAGE. It will contain unsubscription information as well as many useful commands to extract information from the listprocessour. The message will contain many helpful commands to send to the listserver.

The listserv is a sort of automated computer customer support. Subscriptions, requests for information, etc, all go to the listserv software. The particular software domonstrated above was developed for the Bitnet. There are other versions, usually running on Unix, that have minor differences. Keep the original instructions concerning each list to which you subscribe! Here are a few selected listserv commands

command:			description:

get [filename] [filetype] [e-conf] 
				to recieve a copy of a file 
				from a listserv conference

help				to receive a list of basic files
				of documentation on listserv 
				software

index [e-conf name]		to obtain a list of available files

list global			to obtain a list of all Listserv conferences

list global / [string] 

"list global" will provide you with a list of all available BITNet discussion groups. CAVEAT: the list is *long*, so try limiting the serarch to a topic group.   For those who are not subscribed to a BITNet list, the same list may be obtained by sending e-mail to listserv@bitnic.educom.edu.

Another subject search for a mailing lists is Lizst, a Mailing List Search Engine with over 35,000 lists worldwide. For those searching specifically Jewish and Israel interest lists, the Jewishnet Mailing List Resource is a generally up to date site. A list which informs members about new mailing lists is NEW-LIST. [Send the message, "sub NEW-LIST" to the listserv].

For questions about BITNet, send the message, "sub INFONETS ff ll" [where ff= "first name" and ll="last name"] to the INFONETS request. INFONETS provides first rate help on questions concerning all majour computer networks and how to reach them. Shamash also maintains a Guide to the Shamash listprocessour which includes "Users Reference Card to Using ListProc". Many mailing lists are now gatewayed into the Usenet.

Free e-mail provider's list.