By Alan Schwartz
March 1998
Pages: 290
ISBN 10: 1-56592-259-X |
ISBN 13: 9781565922594
(Average of 1 Customer Reviews)
This book covers four mailing list packages (Majordomo, LISTSERV, Listproc, and SmartList) and tells you everything you need to know to set up and run a mailing list, from writing the charter to dealing with bounced messages. It discusses creating moderated lists, controlling who can subscribe, offering digest subscriptions, and archiving list postings.
Full Description
Would you like to set up an electronic discussion forum for your customers? Or how about a mailing list to announce meetings of your local hobby group? Email is the universal Internet application, which makes mailing lists an ideal vehicle for creating electronic communities. All you need to run a mailing list is access to a system that is connected to the Internet, a mailing list management software package, and a bit of know-how, which is where this book comes in.
Managing Mailing Lists is full of practical information for the list maintainer and system administrator alike.
This book covers four mailing list packages: Majordomo, LISTSERV, Listproc, and SmartList. All of these packages run on UNIX systems; LISTSERV runs on a number of platforms, including Windows NT. If you are a system administrator, Managing Mailing Lists tells you what you need to know to pick a mailing list package and get it up and running on your system. It also offers advice on working with the people who are actually maintaining mailing lists on your system, so that you can give them the support they need to run effective, useful lists.
If you are charged with establishing and running a mailing list,
Managing Mailing Lists covers everything you need to know about setting up and maintaining the list, from writing the charter for the list to dealing with bounced messages. Depending on what mailing list software is running on your system, you'll need to work with your system administrator to set up various aspects of the list. This book lays out all the decisions you need to make and tells you what information you need to pass along to the administrator.
Mailing lists offer a great deal of flexibility. For example, you can create a moderated mailing list, so that you can control the content on the list, or you can let anyone post whatever they want, for a more free-form discussion group. You can also exert control over who can subscribe to the list, if you want to limit membership based on certain criteria. You can give your subscribers the option to receive individual messages or message digests and you can archive list postings and make them available to your readership.
Featured customer reviews
Oldie but a goodie, March 04 2008
Rating:
Submitted by
David L
[Respond | View]
When I bought this book back slightly before the dawn of time, I was in the process of standing up several corporate mailing lists to interact with our sendmail gateways. All of this sort of stuff was new to most of us and this book was a great help.
Like all of the ORA blue books, it is straight UNIX. No pointy-clicky stuff here. Instead you get solid command line, text based configuration files and basic troubleshooting techniques for getting your lists running and keeping them running.
It is beginning to show its age in that it no longer covers some of the more modern listserv systems (like mailman) with web based frontends, but it is still a great reference for explaining what a listserv is and how it should be managed and used.
Managing Mailing Lists Review, April 09 1998
Submitted by Jacob Haller [Respond | View]
The easiest thing to do after you read a reference book
is complain, so let me start by saying that I think that
this book is quite well-written and would be a good
resource for anyone wanting to get started using a free
mailing list server on a Unix machine.
That being said, as an experienced LISTSERV maintainer, I
didn't learn much new. (Since I generally only looked at
the LISTSERV and general material, that's mainly what I'll
be talking about.) I'll mainly be using the book to loan
to people who want to learn more, and I'll definately quote
some of the material in the handouts I give to new
listowners.
A couple of gripes: It wasn't clear to me before I got the
book that it would cover LISTSERV _Lite_, not LISTSERV
Classic. It's an understandable decision to make since
Lite is free, but this could have been made clearer on the
cover.
Another issue is that this book was Unix-only, which I
also didn't realize until the book arrived. I had
assumed that it would give some coverage to the different
platforms, but (although it mentioned which of the mailing
list packages were available for other platforms) stuff
like installation instructions, etc. was all for Unix
versions of the products. Again, I don't have a gripe
with that decision, but I would have liked to have known
about that before I got the book. (Now someone will point
me to a place in the book's description that made that
clear, I'm sure.)
But all-in-all I liked the discussion of mail protocals,
the sort of things you should be thinking of when you
set up a mailing list server or create a mailing list,
the comparison of the different packages, and the
information on LISTSERV Lite, and I'll definately be
loaning this book to the LISTSERV-administrator-in-
training that I'm supposed to be bringing up to speed.
Media reviews "…gave me a solid foundation in several major mail list programs."--Daniel Fishman, Database Trends and Applications, February 2001
"You will be hard pressed to find a book that can compete with Alan Schwartz'
Managing Mailing Lists in the field it covers." --Professional Webmaster, December 2000
"Nothing fancy here, just accurate information in a well-written book. For all collections." --Thomas Gillespie, Library Journal, July 1998
Read all reviews
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