Manage Mailing Lists with Outlook Express for Macintosh

Mailing Lists and Management Problems

Mailing Lists are a wonderful communication tool. You can discuss with a potentially huge number of people while enjoying all the advantages of email. It's easy to sign up to mailing lists, it's easy to send messages to the list, it's easy to unsubscribe.

About.com Poll Should Microsoft implement Mailing List Manager for Windows, too? Yes. No. I don't care. Current Results

It's easy to unsubscribe? Is it really always a trivial matter to get off a mailing list? Sometimes, we do not remember all the commands for all the mailing lists.

This is one of the problems we encounter when we try to manage our mailing lists. Another is that the Reply-To header field may be set with the sender of a message to the mailing list, not the mailing list's address itself. This means that if you merely hit "Reply" to answer a message, your reply will only go to the author of the message, not to all members of the list.

These problems are waiting for a solution.

Outlook Express 5 Mailing List Manager

With the addition of mailing list manager to the Macintosh edition of Outlook Express 5, Microsoft has come closer to solving the problems with managing mailing lists.

For every mailing list a profile can be set up containing necessary information. The mailing list manager can be opened by selecting "Tools | Mailing List Manager".

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Adding a List

While you can click on the "New" button in the mailing list manager to add a mailing list "by hand", you fill hardly encounter a situation where this is necessary. This is because you can use a message sent via a mailing list as a template and create the list profile from there.

Let's take this message to (or from?) the Linux kernel mailing list.

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By clicking on the message while holding down the Control key, we bring up the context menu. Among the many options available we find, rather to the bottom of the list, "Create Mailing List Rule...".

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Selecting this menu option brings up a dialog called "Mailing List Rule: Untitled". Outlook Express calls the profiles you can create for mailing lists "rules". This probably stems from one of its main purposes: filing messages coming from a mailing list to a dedicated folder, which makes reading the list and following its discussion much easier.

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But let's first give the list "rule" a descriptive name (at least more descriptive than "Untitled"). I called the rule for the Linux kernel list "linux-kernel".