One type of electronic mailing list is an announcement list, which is used primarily as a one-way conduit of information and may only be "posted to" by selected people. Mailing lists archives are a unique opportunity for historians to explore interactions, debates, even tensions that reveal a lot about communities. Not only the text of the corpus of messages has yet to be perennially archived, but also their related metadata, timestamps, headers that define topics, etc. From the historian's point of view, the issue of the preservation of mailing lists heritage (and Internet fora heritage in general) is essential.
#MAILING LISTS FOR FREE SERIES#
Topics include TV series fandom, online culture, or scientific practices among many other academic studies. Īnthropologists, sociologists and historians have used mailing lists as fieldwork.
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. It is pivotal to the structure and topicality of debates within mailing lists as an arena, or public sphere in Habermas wording. 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.
Broadly speaking, the scholarly mailing lists can even be seen as the modern version of the salons of the Enlightenment ages, designed by scholars for scholars. In so doing, they have also built the first tools of human computer-mediated communication. The aim of the computer scientists involved in this project was to develop protocols for the communication between computers. The genealogy of mailing lists as a communication tool between scientists can be traced back to the times of the fledgling Arpanet. Mailing lists have first been scholarly mailing lists. Some mailing lists allow individual subscribers to decide how they prefer to receive messages from the list server (individual or digest). Examples: subscribe anylist or subscribe anylist John Doe.Įlectronic 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. 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. 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. However, mailing list servers existed long before the World Wide Web, so most also accept commands over email to a special email address.
#MAILING LISTS FOR FREE SOFTWARE#
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.Ī web-based interface is often available to allow people to subscribe, unsubscribe, and change their preferences. 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.
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