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United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) |
Dear Miss POPIN*,
In the past several issues of the Asia-Pacific POPIN Bulletin, you introduced various convenient ways for communicating and seeking information using the Internet. Besides e-mail and the World Wide Web, how else could we find useful information related to our work as members of POPIN? Also, previously you said that you would explain “listservs” to us. Could you please offer us some good ideas about this as we don’t know what it is, but often see references to it as in your column?
Dear POPIN members,
There are indeed other ways to obtain useful information. From the previous explanations in this column, I know that all of you have some knowledge of the many services available on the Internet such as e-mail, Gopher and the World Wide Web.
What are commonly referred to as “listservs” are just one more of the many services available on the Internet, and they may prove to be very useful to Asia-Pacific POPIN members.
Well, since you already know about e-mail, I can start by telling you that the term “listservs” refers loosely to mailing list programs designed to copy and distribute electronic mail to everyone subscribing to a particular mailing list. This type of software manages and distributes the mail to subscribers. However, to be precise, the proper name of such programs is not “listserv”; they should be called “mail servers”. What has happened over time is that many people use the term “listserv” generically to refer to any list mail server program, so we are stuck with some confusion right from the start. “LISTSERV”, in capital letters, is a commercial product sold by Eric Thomas’s “L-Soft”.
In addition, there are several other mail server programs: for example, Almanac, Listproc (Unix ListProcessor), Mailbase, Mailserv, Majordomo and “Revised Listserv” (also called BITNET LISTSERV). However, the above-mentioned LISTSERV program is especially prevalent.
“The commands for subscribing and unsubscribing under most of these programs are the same; however, other useful commands differ greatly from one program to another, and some programs support features that others do not”, according to Mr Patrick Douglas Crispen from the University of Alabama.
Nonetheless, these programs all have the same purpose. Referring to mail servers in general, Mr Crispen added: “LISTSERVs work on a concept called ‘mail explosion’. A single piece of e-mail is sent to a central address (the LISTSERV’s address), and the LISTSERV then ‘explodes’ the letter by duplicating that single letter and sending one copy of that letter to every single person subscribed to a particular mailing list. This ‘mail explosion’ concept is what allows anyone subscribed to a LISTSERV to communicate with all the other subscribers with just a single e-mail letter sent to a central address”.
To make things a bit more complicated, there are two types of mailing list administrator: humans and computer programs, or “listservs”. You can communicate with human administrators in plain and polite English, but you must “speak” to listservs in computerized commands only. Also, there are two types of mailing list: (1) moderated lists, which have human moderators who screen all incoming e-mail and redistribute only a selected portion to the list and (2) unmoderated lists which just pass along all the e-mail.
In this regard, always remember to send your letters to the list address, and your commands to the listserv address. Now that I have told you about all these details, you are probably wondering how to identify listservs useful to you. There are several ways to find groups of people who share your interests and hobbies and who also use the Internet. Those interests may cover thousands of topics ranging from cooking and stamp-collecting to library science. These interest groups are referred to as mailing lists (“lists” for short) because they are literally mailing lists of the members’ e-mail addresses. How do you find interesting groups, and what are the addresses of these lists? Well, there are a few ways to do this:
- Word of mouth — someone tells you about a new list that you may want to check out.
- The “Internet Yellow Pages”, which you may obtain from bookstores or from the Web.
- Through the use of search engines on the Web.
- The LIST GLOBAL or LIST GLOBAL /STRING command. (See explanation below.)
- Announcements contained in other lists for example, go to http://www2.portal.ca/~cmc/lists/findlist.htm. Now that you know how to find interesting groups, I’ll assume that you have obtained some addresses.
What steps are needed to subscribe to these groups, using a listserv? The concrete steps are as follows: first, you should add your name and e-mail address to the mailing list. After you do so, then you will receive a standard letter of welcome (via e-mail) telling you about the list; please keep it as it contains important information. After that, you will receive all e-mail sent to the list by its members, who now include you. You too may join the discussion and exchange views with the other members. If you would like to respond to one person’s e-mail, you can do so, or you can send your response to the entire list for everyone to read. Also, you can unsubscribe yourself from a list if the material you receive is inappropriate to your interests, or if the volume of mail is too heavy for you. Now for the actual instructions. First, using your e-mail software, prepare to send a message to the mailing list’s address. For the three most popular programs, the following commands should be given to subscribe or unsubscribe to mailing lists that meet your interests and information needs:
- The command for Listserv subscriptions is sub yourfirstname
yoursurname in the body of your e-mail message. If you should later want to unsubscribe,
you would write to the same address, but this time use the command signoff in the
body of your e-mail message.
For the Majordom program, the command is subscribe listname in the body of your e-mail message. If you should later want to unsubscribe, you would write to the same address, but this time use the command unsubscribe listname in the body of your e-mail message.
For the Listproc program, the command is subscribe listname yourfirstname yoursurname in the body of your e-mail message. If you should later want to unsubscribe, you would write to the same address, but this time use the command unsubscribe in the body of your e-mail message.
For all three programs, if you would like to obtain further information on commands, type help in the body of your e-mail message.
Once you have subscribed, you will receive more information about the specified list through your e-mail. I have described for you practically all that you will need to know about listservs in order to obtain information from them. I have concentrated on only one type of software, because it is so popular. If you want to learn how to use all the types of software, I provide information below for that purpose. Also, I should say that there is more that you can do with e-mail than just these things, but that would be the subject of some future column, since the steps are quite complex. In the meantime, just remember that besides distributing letters, “LISTSERVs can also serve as a ‘library’ of files”, Mr Crispen explained. You can retrieve a lot of information using nothing but a simple e-mail letter sent to the mail server’s address with a few simple commands in the body of that letter. You may wish to access some sites on the Web that explain these and other matters related to listservs in greater detail. Here are a few URLs for you to pursue: http://www.rh.edu/tis/Roadmap/MAP02.html http://www.gweep.bc.ca/~edmonds/usenet/ml-providers.html http://www2.portal.ca/~cmc/lists/index.html http://www.paml.net/sources.html
A library-oriented list of addresses may be found at the following URL: http://www.wrlc.org/LiblistsQueries/TView.idc (Although I was able to access this site in July, the company announced that it was trying to improve the site, so it may not always be accessible.) As I mentioned above, those of you who would like the greatest amount of information on LISTSERVs, use the following technique to obtain an in-depth guide. Send an e-mail message to: listserv@earncc.bitnet with the following in the message block: get lsvguide memo. I hope that this information is useful to you. I look forward to learning about your experiences in tapping this rich information resource.
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