[thelist] simple quesiton

[Morbus Iff]

 >what typically happens after you submit an email address to a "mailing
 >list"?  is the email address parsed into a huge file using some fancy
 >server side scripting?  i'm assuming that one must use server side
 >scripting of some sort to automate the process...i can't imagine that
 >someone sits around typing email addresses into a huge list.

It really depends, but most of the time, yeah, no one types email addresses 
into a list. That'd be silly. There are really three ways you can do it:

  a) Yourself.
  b) Yourself (with the server).
  c) Third Party.

a) involves using a normal email program and setting up filters to add and 
subtract addresses from an address book entry. Pegasus Mail is prima-donna 
for this, but you can get limited functionality from other programs.

b) includes mailing list servers like Majordomo, ListServ, and the like. 
When you sign up for Majordomo (for example), Majordomo just adds it to a 
large plain text file, with one email address per line. When someone sends 
to a majordomo list, mj opens up that list and uses that list to pass the 
message off to the mail transporter (which is usually sendmail or ... ... 
dammit, can't think of more names. postfix is another, but that's not what 
I was hunting for).

c) is like Yahoo Groups, or Onelist.


Morbus Iff
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