Managing Mailing Lists: Majordomo, LISTSERV, Listproc, and SmartList

This comprehensive guide is for anyone who wants to run or manage a mailing list, including the busy system administrator who needs to ensure that user-owned mailing lists run as trouble-free as possible. Schwartz concentrates on Unix systems and software because they are well proven, stable, and free (plus, most mailing lists are based in Unix systems). Discussions of Unix systems and commands can be dry, but Schwartz is thoughtful enough to interject some humorous examples. He covers the technicalities of list operation, including the selection and use of all the leading software. He also goes into the pros and cons of the various strategic questions that list managers must face, such as whether or not a list should be moderated or whether or not to allow nonsubscribers to post to a list. This book will save any new list manager a great deal of time and trouble. -- Elizabeth Lewis

Product Description
Mailing lists are an ideal vehicle for creating email-based 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 which 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. If you are charged with establishing and running a list, this book covers everything you need to know about setting up and maintaining the list, from writing the charter to dealing with bounced messages. Mailing lists offer a great deal of flexibility, and this book lays out all the different options, such as creating moderated lists, controlling who can subscribe to a list, offering digest subscriptions, and archiving list postings.

Through all the pages of the text, this book didn't provide any useful information on setting up mailing lists. The author is vague and never focuses on any mailing list manager program, instead he just gives little facts on all different ones. One cannot possibly set up a mailing list from the info in this book.

Often the book would raise questions and leave them unanswered. He would describe certain problems with mailing lists (i.e. malicious attacks, susceptibility to human errors), but it was up to you and a lot of web surfing to find out how to solve these problems.

Not the kind of text I would expect O'Reilly to print.


Essential for Majordomo list administrators   September 21, 2001
Makiko Itoh (Earth)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

I don't know about the other MLMs described in this book, but if you must administer a Majordomo mailing list, this book is essential. You should also subscribe to the majordomo users list and the list moderator's list (if that applies to you) at GreatCircle.com too, but for having the information you need about how to set up the config files and the users etc for generating digests and so on, this book is quite useful. However, it has some shortcomings - not much information about setting up web archives, or dealing with MIME, etc. And there is nothing at all about Mailman, the other heavyweight mailing list manager. Perhaps an update is due that covers Mailman?


Quite useful!   January 2, 2001
Gerald Ford (The Jack n' the Box at the corner)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

I bought this book because I needed to familiarize myself with ListProc, Listserve and Majordomo, all 3 of which are used at my University. I got just what I needed. This book covers everything you need to know about these, plus it has some extras which help round out the book. I became convinced that SmartList was useful for my home system, and have installed it, and I also enjoyed some of the articles posted in the book.

My only coplaint about this book was the lack of clarity regarding email headers (which came up pretty often throughout). I supposed I should have read the intro chapter more closely. Still, it really wasn't hard to follow along the book. I enjoyed this book much and can't wait to see the Second Edition. :)


Somewhat narrow   April 14, 2000
Geoffrey Brown (Taconic, CT United States)
15 out of 23 found this review helpful

I really hate to give what is a basically negative review to ANY O'Reilly book. However, the focus of this volume -- entirely on four free UNIX mailing list packages -- falls short in two ways: 1. With the exception of LISTSERV, it totally neglects the commercial sphere of mailing list software. Not liking commercial packages is okay; pretending they don't exist, or that there might not be excellent reasons to use one is not. I run two mid-size lists for a non-profit on a commercial web-based service (Onelist, recently become E-list) and felt the omission of this option (even if I do pay for these by including their ads) would be a disservice for anyone just getting started with mailing lists. Just as there are plenty of users for whom Windows is just fine (Linux is not for everyone -- yet), not everyone who runs mailing lists needs to use UNIX freeware. 2. I would like to have seen some sample FAQs. In my experience, running a mailing list is NOT a technical problem, it is a people problem. There is too little in the book addressing that aspect. If you are a sysadmin or ISP deciding which mailing list software you need to provide for free, and how to install it, this is the book for you.