Mailing List Management Software

A Brief History of Electronic Mailing Lists

LISTSERV® was the first electronic mailing list software application, originally developed by Eric Thomas in 1986 for the Bitnet computer network. The word "listserv" is often (incorrectly) used as a generic term for any email-based mailing list application of that kind. L-Soft International, Inc. has a registered trademark for the term, and argues that it is not legal to use the term commercially except in reference to the L-Soft product. The proper generic term is mailing list. (read about the History of LISTSERV)

Listserv was originally written for IBM mainframes but there are now many alternatives for UNIX machines and PCs, such as Majordomo.

Majordomo is an open source mailing list manager developed by Great Circle Associates. It works in conjunction with sendmail on UNIX and related operating systems. It came into widespread use beginning in 1992, predating the popularity of the web browser, in an era when many people had email access but no Web access. As a result, tasks such as subscribing and unsubscribing are handled by sending email messages, a process that seems cumbersome today. Before the use of Majordomo, mailing lists were maintained manually, with a list owner adding and removing participants by editing a text file.

Due to the design of Majordomo, certain features (archiving, digesting, and moderated lists) are currently done in a "non-optimum" fashion. Before the summer of 2005, most of the IRIS mailing lists were run using Majordomo.

majordomo - n: a person who speaks, makes arrangements, or takes charge for another. From latin "major domus" - "master of the house".

GNU Mailman is another open-source mailing list software that has gained popularity in recent years. Mailman is written in the Python programming language and can work with any common Unix mail server software, including Postfix, Sendmail and qmail. User features include the Web interface, built-in archiving of messages, automatic processing of bounce messages, digest mode, and spam filtering.

Mailman's chief distinction is its easy-to-use Web interface for list administration.

Futher Reading

Electronic mailing list (Wikipedia)

History of LISTSERV®

Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager

Majordomo

Submitted by Tim Knight, IRIS DMC