These are also referred to as mailing lists or list-servs, but whatever they're called, they mean the same thing. A mailing list is a glorified email 'cc' - sending copies of exactly the same email or, when referring to mailing lists or Usenet post to a large number of people.
Rather than having to know the email addresses of all of the people you want to send a post to, the hosting service does this for you. The hosting service will keep a list of all of the different discussion lists and the people who subscribe to them. All that you have to do is to find the list that you want to join, join it and then start participating in the discussions!
The image above shows in a graphical format how a mailing list works. The computer in the top left hand corner posts an email message to the Mailing list host (thick black line), which then sends the same message out to everyone else on the list (broken black line). The person using the computer bottom left responds, both to the list (thick grey line), and to the original enquirer (thin broken grey line), and copies are sent by the Mailing list host to everyone else on the list. In this example, the person who sent the original post will get two copies of the respondents post - one from the mailing list and a personal copy.
This does of course depend on the particular mailing list, but the following are common subjects for most groups:
There are two major websites that you can visit to obtain more
information, and lists that you can join.
Probably the best is
JiscMail at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ (with an
archive of old postings held at Mailbase at
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/.) This site
gives you access to thousands of mailing lists (more are constantly being
added). You can use the utilities at Mailbase to search for discussion lists
that match your interests, or if you know of one in particular (such as
lis-link, a mailing list for information professionals) you can click on the
appropriate letter of the alphabet and go directly to it.
Once you have found an appropriate list, check the archives. This will provide you with much useful information; the number of postings to the list every month (do check this - some lists are very busy with hundreds of messages a week, others are quiet, with perhaps one or two), you can search the archives in order to check and see if your particular interest has recently been discussed, and get the general 'feel' of the group.
Next, check the joining instructions and leaving instructions for the group. This will be needed, since you send instructions to one address, and use another address to send your messages - if you get it wrong, everyone will see your message asking to leave a list for example, and you'll end up looking a little silly. You may also find information about the kind of posts you can make to a list - some will frown on blatently commercial postings for example.
Once you've got all the information you require, join the list! But please be sensible, and only join one or perhaps two at a time, otherwise you may well end up getting hundreds of messages a day, and even just deleting most of them will take up a lot of your time.
The second resource that is worth looking at is Liszt.com at http://www.liszt.com/ (or as it's known now, Topica at http://www.topica.com/). Liszt provides you with access to over 90,000 different lists, arranged in a Yahoo! type approach. You can search, obtain more information on the lists and get joining instructions. Liszt is perhaps not as 'formal' as Mailbase, having a wider subject base, including what I'd call 'non serious' lists, covering personal and hobby interests.
The concept behind newsgroups and mailing lists is exactly the same - the opportunity to 'talk' to lots of other people that share the same common interests as you. There are over 50,000 newsgroups in existance, and the posts to them add up to over 1 gigabyte per day - over 24,000,000 participate in them and it is the largest public information resource in the world and (based on size) is up to four times the size of the World Wide Web.
Newsgroups are split into hierarchies, and a newsgroup name is composed of several different elements separated by dots, such as news.announce.newusers There is what is known as the 'Big 7' hiearchy, and the top level of these is:
There are several other groups that are worth mentioning, such as:
Once again, the basic concept is the same, in that you write your message (or post), send it to a central source where it then gets copied, or propagated around the world. However, rather than using a mail host such as Mailbase, your message is sent to your Internet Service Provider (ISP), who will have a news server. The news server keeps a list of all the groups the ISP has decided to take and then it copies it to other news servers around the world, as you can see from the following illustration.
In this example, the person in the top left corner has posted a message to a newsgroup (thick black line), which goes to the news server and is then copied to other people using the same ISP who take that group, and then on to all the other news servers. Someone else replies and the message gets sent back to the news servers and then onto the original poster. As you can see, the only real difference between that and discussion lists is that news servers talk to each other and pass the postings around the world, rather than having it done by a single Mail list host.
However, it should also be mentioned that, although the concept is the same, posting to/reading Newsgroups requires special software, called a Newsreader. The newsreading software takes care of posting and recieving posts, rather than an email package. There are a great many packages available to do this, such as Free Agent which is available from http://www.forteinc.com/. (Although it should be said that email packages are also now becoming able to do the same job).
The easiest way to get a list of newsgroups is to download and install a Newsreader and point it towards your ISP's news server (if you are in any doubt about this, ask the ISP and they will help). The Newsreader will get a list of all the available newsgroups and display them for you. You can then chose the ones you wish to subscribe to and when you next log on your newsreader should get the new postings for you, allow you to view them, and reply to any that you wish.
However, Google is perhaps your best bet. As well as being a regular search engine, Google has archived over 700,000,000 messages from the last twenty years, and it's likely that you can find what you need directly from them at http://www.google.com/grphp
There is no right or wrong answer here; neither is intrinsically better than the other. My advice would be to concentrate on your subject area(s) of interest and do a little research to identify discussion lists and newsgroups that match them. Once you've done that, try them out for size. They're all free, so the most that you'll lose is a little time. I suppose if really pushed, I'd have to say that discussions lists are like going to a high class wine bar, while newsgroups are more like going down to your local pub!
© Phil Bradley, 2002. Last updated 16th April 2002