Here's The News from Hen's Teeth Network

Free Newsletter published by Hen’s Teeth Network (www.hens-teeth.net)
July 2003

Contents:

Feature: Many Uses for Mailing Lists

Product news: Mailing List Hosting

Did you know about: Mailing List Settings

Bonus Did you know about: Email and Your Work Computer

Feature: Many Uses for Mailing Lists

All email users have made informal mailing lists. We do this when we put several email addresses in the “to” section of an email and then reply to that same group of addresses whenever communicating with them. This is OK for short-term needs when we have to send information to several people. But it is difficult to maintain if the group membership or the individual addresses change. And it is relatively ugly to look at if the list of addressees is particularly long. Also, all the people to whom the message is sent see all the addresses of the other people to whom the message is sent.

More formal lists of addresses can be managed as list members by mailing list management software (such as Lyris, Listserv, Mailman, or Majordomo). The management software gives the list administrator tools to manage the membership and the message postings. Tools vary in the different mailing list management software packages available. Hen’s Teeth Network offers Mailman (www.mailman.sourceforge.net) on various types of hosted accounts (see Product News).

The list administrator typically maintains the member addresses. Automated messages can be sent upon subscribing or unsubscribing. List messages can be archived. Members can manage their own settings (suspending during a vacation, for instance, or receiving messages bundled once daily instead of when posted). Lists can be private or public, open to non-member postings or not, moderated or not, anonymous or not. Headers show the name of the list rather than the individual addresses of list members.

Mailing lists as originally implemented were a one-directional channel for information distribution. That is still one of the main ways to use mailing lists. Another way is to use the list as an interactive announcement and discussion venue. This discussion can be short term and for a particular purpose or it can be open-ended and broadly topic-related. Mailing lists can serve as the restricted communication for an administrative body. They can be a bulletin board where people post items of interest on some topic. They can be a virtual meeting place where members chat about whatever interests them. They can be used as information channels for practice times and places for school sports teams. They can be used as part of distance learning curricula. They can serve as support groups. In other words, mailing lists can be used for a startling variety of purposes, with varying degrees of interaction among list members.

Product News: Mailing List Hosting

You can have unlimited numbers of mailing lists with unlimited levels of membership on any Virtual Private Server Account (VPS) you host with Hen’s Teeth Network. For people using multiple mailing lists either professionally or for support networks, this may be the most cost-effective choice.

For those with more modest mailing list needs, there are two other levels available. You can host small mailing lists (up to 20 members per list) for $5/month/list ($60 paid annually). A mailing list with an unlimited number of subscribers is $19/month/list (three month minimum). See http://www.hens-teeth.net/html/products/mailman.htm for details.

Did You Know About: Mailing List Settings

The mailing list administrator uses list settings to set up and maintain the mailing list. These settings control such things as whether a poster receives a copy of his/her own posting, whether the list is archived (and for how long), whether the list is moderated, etc. So, for instance, if you use a mailing list for information distribution, you would not allow message posting by members. If you use a mailing list for a discussion group, you might not allow postings by non-members, but you would allow postings by members. Privacy settings let you control whether or not list members can get a listing of all members. There are settings to customize text in messages that are automatically sent. And the list administrator can control the material posted to the list by making the list moderated. This means that any posting submitted to the list first gets reviewed by the moderator to see whether it is appropriate for the list’s purposes or not. Lists that try to limit the number of postings or which were created for very specific purposes and wish to limit all discussion to those purposes might benefit from being moderated if a person can be found who is interested in taking on the moderator role.

Bonus Did You Know About: Email and Your Work Computer

If you use your work computer (a computer belonging to your employer) to read your personal email, the act of reading the email creates a copy of that email on the computer you are using. This is true even if you use a web browser to read mail on a free service such as Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail. All files on the employer’s computer belong to the employer. The courts have upheld this many times.

This may or may not be an issue for you or for your employer. However, it is one of the real ways that electronic mail is different from paper mail. Once the file is on the employer’s computer, there is no restriction against it being accessed by the employer. With paper mail, if you throw it away it is public property, but there is otherwise no assumption that people other than the addressee have any right to read it.

Given this fact, and the potential security impact from the employer’s point of view and the potential privacy impact from the employee’s point of view, it makes life simpler for many people to separate their personal and professional email addresses into different accounts and to read the personal email only on personally owned computers and to read the professional email only on the employer’s computer.

Hen’s Teeth Network offers professional and family email packages as cost-effective solutions to the problems that can be caused by mixing personal and professional business on your employer’s computer (http://www.hens-teeth.net/html/products/email.htm)

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Thank you.
Candy Zemon, editor