Mailing Lists - Email for groups
Because there are many situations in which a group rather than an individual is the target of communication, some online applications have been designed for this purpose. One way to do this makes use of e-mail. Instead of sending an e-mail to another person, an e-mail is sent to a designated address, from this address the message is relayed to all individuals on a pre-established list of readers. Applications of this type are often called mailing lists or listservs, and the site from which the list originates is called the list server. Schools might set up a list of teachers, a list of students, and lists of the students in each class. Each list would be associated with a different submission address. An administrator wanting to provide all teachers with information about an upcoming in-service event would send an email to the submission address associated with the teacher listserv. A different address would be used should the administrator want to inform all students that classes would be dismissed early on Friday so that their teachers can attend this in-service.
Listservs can be quite helpful for the professional development of working teachers. Listservs can offer the opportunity to tap into the “collective intelligence” of a group with which you share common interests. For example, a new teacher might send a message asking for information about what other schools have done to keep students from accessing inappropriate material. Each person or institution on the list would receive the message, and many might reply. Each reader would also see the responses of other members of the list.
Often discussions focus on a specific topic until the topic is exhausted and then move on to something new. The sequence of messages on one topic is called a thread. A thread is created when a user replies to a previous message. Most e-mail systems have a reply option that preserves the header (a descriptive phrase) from the previous message, and this allows all the messages on one topic to be stored together. Archived files of list discussions allow you to a follow a thread and ignore unrelated messages.
Joining a List Maintained by a Server
It is not difficult to join a mailing list. Electronic mailing lists usually have both a submission address and an administrative address. The submission address is the one to use to send messages you want included on the list. To subscribe to the list, however, you typically need to send a message to the administrative address. Your subscription request should have a blank subject line (that is, nothing in the e-mail field that asks for the subject) and should include the simple statement SUBSCRIBE LISTNAME FIRSTNAME LASTNAME as the main body of the message—that is, the word subscribe followed by the name of the list, your first name, and your last name. This is a common method of joining a list but different lists enroll new users in different ways. Often, the individual who administers listservs with smaller membership will enroll participants.
When you first subscribe to a list, you may be sent a summary of the procedures that apply to that list. Often the procedures explain what to do if you are going to be away from your computer for a while and would rather your e-mail inbox not be filled with mail from the list. You may also be told how to receive the individual messages as a digest (a single file instead of many individual messages) and how to remove yourself from the list.
One of the major problems in the use of lists over time is that users frequently forget the administrative address. Although they constantly receive e-mail messages, the messages come from the submission address, and the administrative address is not mentioned. Since you will need the administrative address to implement any of the procedures, be sure to save the instructions you receive when you first subscribe.
One more hint about using mailing lists: Often telecommunications services have an automatic reply feature, which allows you to send a message in response to one you have just received. When reading a message on a mailing list, remember that the immediate source of the message is the list server, not the person who actually wrote the message. Using the reply feature will send what you may intend to be a private message to all members on the list. More than one person has been embarrassed by such an error. The message author’s address will appear somewhere in the message; this is the address to use when private correspondence is desired.