What Else Should I Know?

Administrative and List Addresses

The trickiest part to using mailing lists is distinguishing between administrative and list addresses.

A mailing list's administrative address is used to manage your subscription. You will use this address to subscribe or unsubscribe to a list, retrieve old messages, and access help files. Based on our previous examples, here is the Scout Report's administrative address.

A mailing list's list address is the email address you use to send messages to others on the list. For example, to send a message to everyone on the Scout Report mailing list, you would use the following email address:

NOTE: We use this list address only as an example. The Scout Report is set up only to distribute messages. It does not accept messages from subscribers.

Public and Private Lists

Of all the mailing lists, only about 30% are available to the public. The remainder are private mailing lists. Membership to private lists is usually decided by the list owner (person who maintains the list). If you are not sure if a list is public, send an email message to the list owner.

Moderated Lists

To cut down on the amount "noise" (off-topic messages), many mailing lists are moderated. If a list is moderated, all messages will go to an actual person who then decides if the message should be forwarded to the entire list.

Digests

Busy mailing lists can easily generate more than 50 messages a day. Digest versions of mailing lists help reduce the number of incoming messages by combining individual posts into a single large message. Check your confirmation message to see if your mailing list offers a digest version.

The Master Internet Volunteer Program was developed by the University of Minnesota Extension Service and was adapted for use in North Dakota with permission. Copyright  © 2000  North Dakota State University. All rights reserved.

North Dakota State University Extension Service