What is a Listserv?

General Guidelines When Using a Listserv

Useful Listserv Resources

What is a Listserv?

A listserv is a wonderful communication tool that offers its members the opportunity to post suggestions or questions to a large number of people at the same time. When you submit a question or something that you want to share to the listserv, your submission is distributed to all of the other people on that list.

Each listserv targets a specific topic of discussion. Before submitting a query or a comment to the entire listserv group, you may want to monitor the discussions. After monitoring, you'll be able to tell what are acceptable submissions.

Each listserv has two different addresses:

1. list address: This is the address you use to submit suggestions, questions, or share knowledge with the entire group. This message will be distributed to all people on the listserv. This is known as "sending mail to the list."

2. LISTSERV address: This is the address that you send commands to such as subscribing and unsubscribing.

When you subscribe to a list, your name and e-mail address are added to the list. You will receive an authorization message to confirm that you do in fact wish to be added to the list . Upon confirming your request, you will receive a standard letter of welcome (via e-mail) telling you about the list. From that time on, you will receive all e-mail (postings) sent to the list by its members. You may follow the discussions or join in on them. If you respond, you can send your response to the list (in which case, all members of the list will receive it), or to an individual on the list. You can unsubscribe from a list at any time.

General Guidelines When Using a Listserv

1. Keep a Copy of the Welcome Letter When you successfully sign-up with a listserv, they'll send you a welcome message. This letter will contain tips for sending your mail as well as how to unsubscribe from that mailing list. You should store this message either on your computer or print a hard copy and make a folder of listservs that you belong to.

2. Check Your E-mail Daily Some listservs will send several messages daily. Others will send one message in the form of a digest . This is one long message containing several responses to the listserv. Other listservs send messages weekly, and others are very sporadic. Regardless of how this listserv shares information with the group, you need to make a commitment to check your e-mail daily. Remember that the webserver that stores your incoming e-mail messages only has so much disk space.

3. Following Threads of Discussions By signing up with a listserv, you are not obligated to respond to all messages, or to any message. Pick and choose the topics that interest you. Look at the subject line of the incoming messages to see which thread of discussion is being addressed in that message. In large listservs, several different threads of discussions will be ongoing at one time.

4. Help When You Can The purpose of listservs is to share information. Help individuals in a query whenever you can, because someday you may want help locating information. Sometimes it is better to respond to just an individual rather than sending your message to the entire listserv group.

5. Unsubscribe If You'll Be Gone If you plan on being gone for more than a week and will be unable to check your e-mail, you should unsubscribe from the list then you can resubscribe when you return.

6. Use a Meaningful Subject Line When people receive mail from a listserv, one of the first pieces of information they look at is the subject line. Most people will keep the same subject line when they respond to a particular thread of discussion. Some people will delete unread messages simply because the subject line announces a topic that they are not interested in. This saves time for many people. If you subscribe to a high volume listserv, you'll appreciate those messages that have clear, meaningful subject lines.

7. Sending Attachments Never send attachments with e-mail messages to individuals or to the listserv without prior permission from the recipient.

Useful Listserv Resources

Netiquette
www.albion.com/netiquette/book/index.html

L-Soft International
This site allows you to search the database for sites whose host name (LISTSERV.XYZ.EDU) and/or description ("Swedish University Network (SUNET), Stockholm, Sweden") matches your search string.
www.lsoft.com/lists/site_q.html

Liszt, The mailing list directory
Search Liszt's main directory of 90,095 mailing lists
www.liszt.com