Mississippi University for Women has adopted the GNU Mailman mailing list manager program. Mailman is a web-based program that allows the university to more effectively use e-mail for courses, departmental communications, and interactions within campus groups and clubs.

This document is intended for users who are members of a mailing list and who want to get the most out of the system. Computing Services provides a separate guide for list managers, the persons who "own" lists and are responsible for their lists maintenance.

What is a mailing list?

A mailing list is simply a list of e-mail addresses of people that share a common interest in a topic, such as members of the same work group, or students of a particular class. When a member posts a message to the list's e-mail address, the e-mail is delievered to all of the members of this particular list. The key advantage of using a mailing list over things such as web-based discussion is the delivery of new messages immediately to the participants' mailboxes.

Mailman, the subject of this document, is a program that will make it easy for you to manage your subscription to any of the mailing lists available at Mississippi University for Women.

Mailing list terms

Before we look further at Mailman there are some key terms that you need to get familiar with.

A mailing list is simply a collections of e-mail addresses. Every mailing list has a list name and a list address. For example: the mailing list for the course EDU 765 would be named edu765 and would have the address edu765@lists.muw.edu. Mailing lists are also referred to as “listserves”.

Mailman is actually a Mailing list Manager (MLM). The mailing list manager is a program that runs on the server and makes it easy to create or remove lists, add or remove users from lists, make message digests, and maintain message archives. As a list subscriber you will only be using the mailing list manager to modify your personal account preferences.

Joining or being added to a list is called subscribing. Leaving a list is called unsubscribing.

Many Mailman lists will be archived. When a list is archived, the mailing list manager stores a copy of each message posted on the list as an archive, which can be easily access at any time from a published web page.

Sometimes mailing lists produce a lot of traffic which can be a nuisance in your mailbox. One of the options that you may consider is setting the delivery to a digest mode. If you request digest delivery then Mailman will store all of the messages that the list receives and sends them to you bundled together as ONE large message every day.

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