JargonFile/entries/mailing list.txt

mailing list

n. (often shortened in context to list ) 1. An email address that is an
alias (or macro , though that word is never used in this connection) for
many other email addresses. Some mailing lists are simple reflectors ,
redirecting mail sent to them to the list of recipients. Others are filtered
by humans or programs of varying degrees of sophistication; lists filtered
by humans are said to be moderated. 2. The people who receive your email
when you send it to such an address. Mailing lists are one of the primary
forms of hacker interaction, along with Usenet. They predate Usenet, having
originated with the first UUCP and ARPANET connections. They are often used
for private information-sharing on topics that would be too specialized for
or inappropriate to public Usenet groups. Though some of these maintain
almost purely technical content (such as the Internet Engineering Task Force
mailing list), others (like the sf-lovers list maintained for many years by
Saul Jaffe) are recreational, and many are purely social. Perhaps the most
infamous of the social lists was the eccentric bandykin distribution; its
latter-day progeny, lectroids and tanstaafl , still include a number of the
oddest and most interesting people in hackerdom. Mailing lists are easy to
create and (unlike Usenet) don't tie up a significant amount of machine
resources (until they get very large, at which point they can become
interesting torture tests for mail software). Thus, they are often created
temporarily by working groups, the members of which can then collaborate on
a project without ever needing to meet face-to-face. Much of the material in
this lexicon was criticized and polished on just such a mailing list (called
jargon-friends ), which included all the co-authors of Steele-1983.