The current buzz around mailing lists goes back to January and the Drudge Report. Washington political observer Matt Drudge reported that Newsweek had pulled a story about an alleged affair between President Clinton and one Monica Lewinsky, setting off a train of events which is still unfolding. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know about the Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com), and how to get hold of it.
Despite this spotlight, mailing lists have a lengthy pedigree, with their simplicity and accessibility making them an extremely popular feature of the Internet. Anyone who can send and receive email can publish a list on anything from fly fishing to the future direction of IBM products. List publishing is the level playing field Internet evangelists prophesied but never actually saw coming.
But there is also a class system within the list hierarchy. While the majority are free and open to all, some are fee-based while others are invite-only. These lists do give the reader that little bit extra. After all, if you're paying $195 a year to receive the technology forecasts of the Strategic News Service, you may find it's money well spent when you consider that it has also been read and probably noted by such players as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
A-lists like Edge and Organic maintain their status because of the people they mail to.
Putting a list together is simplicity itself. Gather the email addresses of friends, acquaintances and people you think would be interested in what you have to say and paste these names into the CC field of your message. (Remember to separate them with a comma, space or whatever your software requires.) The list can be saved to disk, or you can use your email program to create its own list for future transmissions. It's low-tech and it works.
This method is fine if you have just a few dozen names to deal with or if your mailings are irregular.
When it gets to 1,000-plus names and mailing once or twice a week, you need some professional help in the shape of programs which automate the management of your list. Between them, Listserv (for which you pay a small fee) and Majordomo (available as freeware) control over three-quarters of the market.
As with every aspect of the Internet statistics change rapidly, but that's about 300,000 lists, and growing by about 5 per cent a month.
Once you set up a list via Majordomo, for example, virtually all the operations - from subscribing and unsubscribing to actual newsletter delivery - can be performed remotely. There's also the option of setting up and maintaining your list via ad-supported lists like Coollist (www.coollist.com) and OneList (www.onelist.com). To create a list with either one, simply go to its website and follow the very straightforward instructions. New users can join the list by either going to the site or sending a "subscribe" mail to the relative list. Each site also carries a full description of the lists it carries.
To find out about existing Listserv lists (other than those in the panel below) send an email with the Subject field blank and the word "HELP" in the body of the message to listserv@irlearn.ucd.ie. The server will reply with help on how to use it and how to join its lists. Remember that this list of lists can be huge - as can the daily volume from many mailing lists - so don't subscribe to lists from a mail system that is not capable of handling the volume.