Windows NT TCP/IP Network Administration

Mailing Lists

Mailing lists bring together people with similar interests to exchange information and ideas. Most mailing lists run under usage guidelines that restricted discussion to a specific topic. Mailing lists are often used as places to report problems and get solutions, or to receive announcements. Some mailing lists are digests of newsgroups. (More on newsgroups later in the chapter.)

There are an enormous number of mailing lists. The list-of-lists contains information about many of the mailing lists that are of interest to network administrators.^[48]

Use a Web browser to search for mailing lists that interest you at http://catalog.com/vivian/interest-group-search.html. If you prefer, the list-of-lists can be downloaded to your system via anonymous FTP from nisc.sri.com where it is stored in the file netinfo/interest-groups.txt. Either way, you get the same information.

A list-of-lists entry has five sections: the address of the mailing list, the address to which subscription requests are sent, the address of the owner, the date the entry was last updated, and a description of the mailing list.

When you find a list you wish to join, don’t send mail directly to the list asking to be enrolled. Instead, send the enrollment request to the subscription address, which identifies the person or process that maintains the list. If the list is manually maintained, you’re asked to send your enrollment request to list-name-request@host, where list-name is the actual name of the list, ...