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A mailing list is nothing more than a group of e-mail addresses. E-mail sent
to the mailing list name gets “exploded” or copied to every member
on the list. There are several kinds of mailing lists that are in use today.
One type is the kind that any of you use as part and parcel of your desktop
e-mail software. Typically, these lists are found in an address book of some
sorts. The address book contains information on your correspondents, such
as their actual name and e-mail address, and perhaps other information including
postal addresses and phone numbers. Most e-mail software has similar techniques
for creating lists: You go into their address books, create a new list name
and proceed to add members to the list. When you want to send mail to a group,
you first create the group, and then click on the group name in your address
book or type it in explicitly in the mail program. That’s not too difficult,
now is it? The trouble comes when a member’s address changes and you don’t
necessary know when that happens. We’ve found that about 1% to 2% of
our own mailing list changes every week. That doesn’t sound like much,
but it takes time to track down new addresses and make the changes. Given
the other pressing needs of our workday, who wants to have to do list maintenance
as well? The typical situation is the error message you receive that contains a “bounce”
message. As we discussed in Chapter 2, you don’t always know why something
is wrong with the message you sent. And you need to be able to match the error
message and the recipient name with the suspect list that contains the incorrect
information. Then you need to open up your address book of the e-mail program
that sent the message, find that list name, and either delete the now defunct
recipient or figure out why his or her address is no longer valid. Did you
make a typo? Did this person change jobs or job locations? Did this person
decide to switch Internet providers and e-mail identities? It sounds messy,
and it is. And there really isn’t any other way to automatically fix
the problem either. [More details about the challenge of tracking down changes
in e-mail addresses can be found in Chapter 6 of the complete text. -Ed.]
But this is just the tip of the mailing list iceberg. There are plenty of
other mailing lists besides the ones that you maintain inside your own e-mail
program. There are mailing list programs that operate on special e-mail servers:
These run without any human intervention. You send e-mail to a special address,
called the listserv address (named after a popular piece of software that
is used for this purpose), which subscribes you to (or removes you from) the
mailing list. Of course, this includes the exact instructions for these commands
and where they are placed in your e-mail message, depending on the listserv
software being used.7 If your e-mail
isn’t formatted correctly, then the listserv can’t process your
instructions, and it sends back an e-mail with a sometimes cryptic error report.
As we said, computers maintain listservs. This makes it easy for you to forget
about them when you change your e-mail address. Then the trouble begins when
the listserv attempts to deliver mail to your old address. Eventually a carbon-based
life form must manually intervene and remove your old and no longer functioning
e-mail address from the listserv. And, as we mentioned earlier, listservs
have to be smart enough to ignore messages that are generated on your behalf
by a machine, responding to the listserv broadcast mailing by saying that
you are away from your office. Some aren’t, and all sorts of havoc can
occur whereby your out-of-office message gets sent to several hundred of your
closest friends. A third type of mailing list includes those that are maintained by mail system
administrators for the convenience of the entire enterprise of e-mail users.
Typically, these are called “system aliases.” Such lists—for
example, “marketing” for the entire marketing department to send
broadcasts—may also not reflect the current members of the department.
These types of global lists are usually maintained and used by two different
people within an organization. This lengthens or in some cases breaks the
feedback cycle from sending a message to the list to receiving an error message
to determining and making the correction. A simple solution would be to make
sure that all lists can be maintained by the individuals that use them, but
in practice (as we shall see later on in this chapter) that isn’t always
possible or even desirable. There is a reason for the wide diversity of different mailing lists: They
do different things because people have differing requirements. But that doesn’t
make things any easier, especially if you are contemplating using them for
the first time. This may all sound too technical for you. You are probably thinking, “Why
do I care about these mailing lists? Just leave me alone and let me get on
with answering my messages.” Well, here is a short anecdote to illustrate
that lists are becoming more pervasive and popular. We all get those annual holiday newsletters from our family members and supposed
friends. Some of them are annoying, to be sure, but many of us like to hear
about what these people are doing. With the rise of e-mail, some families
have begun their own mailing lists, sending out messages, photos and periodic
greetings to a group at once. The list is automatic—any family member
that knows the list alias can send a message to the group. And the mailing
list keeps everyone in touch without having to duplicate the message to everyone
or remember individual e-mail addresses. We know several families doing this,
and the interesting thing is that the e-mail addresses span different systems
and networks. Let’s look at mailing lists from the standpoint of our print publisher
perspective. With a mailing list, you generally know your audience, especially
if you maintain the list addresses yourself. Even if a computer automatically
signs up subscribers, generally there are ways for you as the list owner to
periodically examine the list of addresses and make some assessment of who
is on your list. Second, you have some control over how people view your content,
because you understand the nature of e-mail and how people read their mail.
(Or you will after you finish reading this chapter.) And, finally, you have
control over the delivery of your content. With all these lists, it becomes hard for you to keep track of where you
store your lists and to remember which list contains which members. Is Joe
in marketing still on the corporate marketing list after he transferred to
Chicago and has a new e-mail address? Did Tom get taken off the distribution
list because he was fired last week, or can he still receive his e-mail? Where
did I put the e-mail that I got when I subscribed to that listserv many months
ago, and why did I subscribe in the first place? You could easily make list
maintenance a full-time job, and indeed in many corporations list maintenance
is a big part of an e-mail system administrator’s workday. 6
For more information on mailing list issues and how to diagnose problems with
them, see The E-mail Companion, by John S. Quarterman and Smoot Carl-Mitchell,
1994, Addison Wesley Publishing. 7
For example, some listservs require the subscribe command to appear by itself
in the Subject:. Others require that the word subscribe be followed by the
actual e-mail address and separated by spaces. Others require the word “subscribe”
to appear on the first line of the message body. Some use another command
word, such as join instead of subscribe. And these commands are supposed to
be sent to the listserv processor address, rather than to a separate address
that is used as the actual broadcast address for the group. This makes for
annoying situations when users trying to join the list mistakenly send their
e-mail containing the sign-up commands as broadcast messages to the entire
list. |
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