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