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How Do Mailing Lists Work?

Mailing lists use a different strategy than newsgroups. Rather than collecting each message and displaying it in a central location, each message is sent (in the order it was received) as an electronic mail message to every member of the list. You then read messages sent to a mailing list in the same way you read other email messages. (Mailing lists are sometimes referred to as listservs, which technically refers to a software program used to create and manage electronic mailing lists.)

The advantage of mailing lists is that you don't need to use a separate software program to read messages posted to the newsgroup. The disadvantage is that you can receive dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of messages per day from a given mailing list.

Note: Newsgroups and mailing lists generate an incredible amount of text each day. Some of them contain detailed analyses of issues and events by contributors who range from interested members of the general populace to acknowledged experts in a particular field. If you subscribe to mailing lists, you can reduce the number of messages you receive each day by using the digest command, which tells the computer running the mailing list to send you one message containing several messages. You can learn how to use the digest command by sending a message to the computer running the list with the word "help" in the subject line. Remember to send the message to the computer's main address, rather than to the list itself.