Amailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients.
Mailing lists are often rented or sold. If rented, the renter agrees to use the mailing list only at contractually agreed-upon times. The mailing list owner typically enforces this by "salting" (known as "seeding" in direct mail) the mailing list with fake addresses and creating new salts for each time the list is rented. Unscrupulous renters may attempt to bypass salts by renting several lists and merging them to find common, valid addresses.[1]
Mailing list brokers exist to help organizations rent their lists. For some list owners, such as specialized niche publications or charitable groups, their lists may be some of their most valuable assets, and mailing list brokers help them maximize the value of their lists. Transmission may be paper-based or electronic. Each has its strengths, although a 2022 article claimed that compared to email, "direct mail still brings in the lion's share of revenue for most organizations."[2]
An electronic mailing list or email list is a special use ofemail that allows for widespread distribution of information to manyInternet users. It is similar to a traditional mailing list – a list of names and addresses – as might be kept by an organization for sending publications to its members or customers, but typically refers to four things:
Electronic mailing lists usually are fully or partially automated through the use of specialmailing list software and a reflector address set up on aserver capable of receiving email. 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.
A web-based interface is often available to allow people to subscribe, unsubscribe, and change their preferences. However, mailing list servers existed long before theWorld Wide Web,[3] so most also accept commands over email to a special email address. 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. 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. Examples:subscribe anylist orsubscribe anylist John Doe.
Electronic 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 indigest 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. Some mailing lists allow individual subscribers to decide how they prefer to receive messages from the list server (individual ordigest).[4]
Mailing lists have first been scholarly mailing lists.[5] The genealogy of mailing lists as a communication tool between scientists can be traced back to the times of the fledglingArpanet. The aim of thecomputer scientists involved in this project was to develop protocols for the communication between computers. In so doing, they have also built the first tools of humancomputer-mediated communication. Broadly speaking, the scholarly mailing lists can even be seen as the modern version of thesalons of theEnlightenment ages, designed by scholars for scholars.[6]
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. It is pivotal to the structure and topicality of debates within mailing lists as an arena, orpublic sphere inHabermas wording. Theflame wars (as the liveliest episodes) give valuable and unique information to historians to comprehend what is at stake in the communities gathered around lists.[7]
Anthropologists, sociologists and historians have used mailing lists as fieldwork.[8] Topics include TV series fandom,[9] online culture,[10] or scientific practices[11] among many other academic studies. From the historian's point of view, the issue of the preservation of mailing lists heritage (and Internet fora heritage in general) is essential. Not only the text of the corpus of messages has yet to be perennially archived, but also their relatedmetadata,timestamps, headers that define topics, etc. Mailing lists archives are a unique opportunity for historians to explore interactions, debates, even tensions that reveal a lot about communities.[12]
On both discussion lists and newsletter lists precautions are taken to avoidspamming.
Companies sending out promotional newsletters, for example, have the option of working withwhitelist mail distributors, which agree to standards and high fines from ISPs should any of theopt-in subscribers complain. In exchange for their compliance and agreement to prohibitive fines, the emails sent by whitelisted companies are not blocked byspam filters, which often can reroute these legitimate, non-spam emails.[13]
Some mailing lists are open to anyone who wants to join them, while others require an approval from the list owner before one may join. Joining a mailing list is called "subscribing" and leaving a list is called "unsubscribing".
A mailing list archive is a collection of past messages from one or more electronic mailing lists. Such archives often include searching and indexing functionality. Many archives are directly associated with the mailing list, but some organizations, such asGmane, collect archives from multiple mailing lists hosted at different organizations; thus, one message sent to one popular mailing list may end up in many different archives. Gmane had over 9,000 mailing list archives as of 16 January 2007. Some popularfree software programs for collecting mailing list archives areHypermail,MHonArc,[14]FUDforum, andpublic-inbox[15] (which is notably used for archiving theLinux kernel mailing list[16] along with many other software development mailing lists[17] and has a web-service API used by search-and-retrieval tools intended for use by theLinux kernel development community[18][19][20]).
Listwashing is the process through which individual entries in mailing lists are to be removed.[21] These mailing lists typically containemail addresses or phone numbers[22] of those that have not voluntarily subscribed. Only complainers are removed via this process. Because most of those that have not voluntarily subscribed stay on the list, this helpsspammers to maintain a low-complaint list of spammable email addresses.Internet service providers who forward complaints to the spamming party are often seen as assisting thespammer in list washing, or, in short, helping spammers. Most legitimate list holders provide their customers with listwashing and data deduplication service regularly for no charge or a small fee.[citation needed]
