id AA06528; Sat, 25 May
91 16:45:14 -0400 Date: Sat, 25 May 91 16:45:14 -0400 From: Matt Groening
Message-Id: <9105252045.AA06528@gracie.com> To:
lsimpson@cs.widener.edu Subject: Scripting your future episodes Reply-To:
writing-group@gracie.com
.... verbiage ...
The full text of the message is returned intact, including any headers that were added.
This can be cut out with an editor and fed right back into the mail system with a proper
address, making redelivery a relatively painless process.
Mailing Lists
People that share common interests are inclined to discuss their hobby or interest at every
available opportunity. One modern way to aid in this exchange of information is by using
a mailing list---usually an email address that redistributes all mail sent to it back out to a
list of addresses. For example, the Sun Managers mailing list (of interest to people that
administer computers manufactured by Sun) has the address
sun-managers@eecs.nwu.edu. Any mail sent to that address will ``explode'' out to each
person named in a file maintained on a computer at Northwestern University.
Administrative tasks (sometimes referred to as administrivia) are often handled through
other addresses, typically with the suffix -request. To continue the above, a request to be
added to or deleted from the Sun Managers list should be sent to
sun-managers-request@eecs.nwu.edu.
When in doubt, try to write to the -request version of a mailing list address first; the other
people on the list aren't interested in your desire to be added or deleted, and can certainly
do nothing to expedite your request. Often if the administrator of a list is busy (remember,
this is all peripheral to real jobs and real work), many users find it necessary to ask again
and again, often with harsher and harsher language, to be removed from a list. This does
nothing more than waste traffic and bother everyone else receiving the messages. If, after
a reasonable amount of time, you still haven't succeeded to be removed from a mailing
list, write to the postmaster at that site and see if they can help.
Exercise caution when replying to a message sent by a mailing list. If you wish to
respond to the author only, make sure that the only address you're replying to is that
person, and not the entire list. Often messages of the sort ``Yes, I agree with you
completely!'' will appear on a list, boring the daylights out of the other readers. Likewise,
if you explicitly do want to send the message to the whole list, you'll save yourself some
time by checking to make sure it's indeed headed to the whole list and not a single
person.
A list of the currently available mailing lists is available in at least two places; the first is
in a file on ftp.nisc.sri.com called interest-groups under the netinfo/ directory. It's updated
fairly regularly, but is large (presently around 700K), so only get it every once in a while.
The other list is maintained by Gene Spafford (spaf@cs.purdue.edu), and is posted in
parts to the newsgroup news.lists semi-regularly. (Usenet News, for info on how to read
that and other newsgroups.)
Listservs
On BITNET there's an automated system for maintaining discussion lists called the
listserv. Rather than have an already harried and overworked human take care of
additions and removals from a list, a program performs these and other tasks by
responding to a set of user-driven commands.
Areas of interest are wide and varied---ETHICS-L deals with ethics in computing, while
ADND-L has to do with a role-playing game. A full list of the available BITNET lists
can be obtained by writing to LISTSERV@BITNIC.BITNET with a body containing the
command
list global
However, be sparing in your use of this---see if it's already on your system somewhere.
The reply is quite large.
The most fundamental command is subscribe. It will tell the listserv to add the sender to a
specific list. The usage is
subscribe foo-l Your Real Name
It will respond with a message either saying that you've been added to the list, or that the
request has been passed on to the system on which the list is actually maintained.
The mate to subscribe is, naturally, unsubscribe. It will remove a given address from a
BITNET list. It, along with all other listserv commands, can be abbreviated---subscribe
as sub, unsubscribe as unsub, etc. For a full list of the available listserv commands, write
to LISTSERV@BITNIC.BITNET, giving it the command help.
As an aside, there have been implementations of the listserv system for non-BITNET
hosts (more specifically, Unix systems). One of the most complete is available on
cs.bu.edu in the directory pub/listserv.
``I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.'' Pascal,
Provincial Letters XVI
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