E-mail Mailing Lists

[Zap!] We love e-mail mailing lists -- they are a great way to participate in online discussions or receive information by e-mail. Some lists are announcement only, which means that the editor/manager/owner of the list sends out information to everyone on the list, but you can't. Other lists are discussion lists, on which every list subscriber can say their piece. For a description of how mailing lists work, read The Mailing List Gurus Page. For even more information, read Poor Richard's Building Online Communities.

Finding Mailing Lists

. To find a list on a topic of interest to you (anything from homeschooling to professional hockey), try these sources:
  • Liszt lets you search a database of tens of thousands of mailing lists.
  • Topica hosts mailing lists, and you can search their lists by topic.
  • Yahoo Groups are similar to mailing lists, because you can set your group subscription so that you receive messages by e-mail. You can search their groups by topic, too.

Some Interesting Lists

Do you want to know what mailing lists we read? Well, here are some of our favorites:

  • CACI Children Accessing Controversial Information: A sometimes contentious list discussing approaches to managing what children who use the Internet can access. Filtering software comes up a lot but that's not all it's about. To subscribe, send a message to caci-request@cygnus.com containing just the word subscribe. To get off the list, send a message containing just the word unsubscribe. (Suggested by John Levine.)

  • Jokes: Sign up for a daily dose of humor by subscribing to the Jokes mailing list. Send an e-mail message to listserver@digfm.org with the words subscribe jokes in the subject. To unsubscribe, send a message to the same address with the words remove jokes in the subject. (Suggested by Matt Ronn, newly wed to Alison Barrows.)

  • BLAGUES-L: A daily joke, alternating in French in English. (Hey, Mom, I'm not wasting time, I'm learning a foreign language.) To subscribe, send a message to blagues-l-request@gurus.com containing the word "subscribe" in the body of the message. (Suggested by John Levine.)

  • MINI-AIR: The Mini-Annals of Improbable Results (MINI-AIR) list is the on-line version of the prestigious Annals of Improbable Results, the successor journal to the world-reknowned Journal of Irreproducible Results. What more can we say? To subscribe, send a message to listproc@air.harvard.edu with the words subscribe mini-air yourname in the text of the message (not in the subject), substituting your actual name for "yourname." To unsubscribe, send the message signoff mini-air to the same address. (Suggested by Margy Levine Young.)

If you'd like to be notified when we update this area of Internet Gurus Central, leave your e-mail address here. (We'll only use this to send you updates about this site, and will not give your address to anyone else, not even our beloved publisher.)

Your e-mail address:

Updated: Mar 14, 2001

Internet Gurus Central >Search This Site >Our Books
Internet Gurus Central
webmaster@gurus.org 		"...For Dummies" is a registered trademark of Hungry Minds, Inc.
© 1998-2009 I.E.C.C. This page created on August 5, 2009.