the university of texas at austin
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF LIBRARY & INFORMATION SCIENCE
Email Information Services
You can receive information by subscribing to one or more mailing lists.
You usually join a list by sending a message to a a program that receives
your request and processes it. This program also keeps the list of
all subscribers updated. After you
join a list, you can send messages to all members of that list by
sending just one copy to the mailing list program. This program will
receive the message, and re-distribute it to all subscribers.
There are hundreds of mailing lists, surely one for each interest
(more on this in a minute.)
Another type of information service that is available on email is
one that lets you retrieve files from remote computers by sending
an email request. This email request will be received by a
special program that will then locate and retrieve the file,
and send it back to you. We will not spend time looking at these
programs here, but if you are interested, be sure to try the
Agora
server, which lets you retrieve web pages via email (and is
heavily used by people who do not have good Internet access,
especially in developing countries.) And, you can try finding
someone you know is active in "Usenet news" using the
USENET user list described in your Krol book, pages 219 and 220.
Mailing Lists
To subscribe to a mailing list, you will need to find one that
interests you. See the following lists of lists on the Web:
listserv and majordomo are the most popular programs
used for handling mailing lists. UT Austin has a computer
that runs majordomo and centrally handles mailing lists
on the campus. The server is "mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu".
To find out how to create a list at UT Austin, click
here.
For this class, I created the lis341 list using my
commercial provider, zilker.net. Starting today, we will
use the lis341 list to post class announcements, and to
discuss class related topics. First, you need to
subscribe to the list:
- Since the software used by zilker.net
for list management is "majordomo",
you send an email message to:
majordomo@zilker.net
- Leave the Subject line blank. This is OK, because
the mailing list program will look mostly at the body of the
message.
- The body of the message should contain one simple line:
subscribe lis341
- After a few seconds or minutes, you will receive a message
from the list server. Keep this message (so you know how to
unsubscribe later on), and be sure to read it carefully.
After you get a list of the various commands, try them out.
Particularly, find out how to retrieve a list of all users who
are subscribed to the list (potential quiz question ;-)
- Now, send a message to the list. To do this, you address the
message to the lis341 group, not to the majordomo program.
Direct your message to:
lis341@zilker.net
Type in a subject line, and then your message. You should
introduce yourself to other members of the list, perhaps
share what you're doing as a final class project and ask
for suggestions.
- Finally, participate in the discussion by responding to
some of the messages you receive through the list. If you
have problems or questions on how to do this, please send
email to Malia, mwatson@gslis.utexas.edu
Week 3 page
