Using Mailing Lists << 3/5 >>
Subscribing
Armano has delved a bit into the German language and, inevitably, discovered a lot of dangerous language. From a friend, he heard about lang-dang. With all the enthusiasm of the newly discovered love, he wanted to discuss this exciting subject with others.
The Subscription Command
Armano wanted to join the lang-dang list. From his friend, he heard how to do that: "All you got to do is send an empty mail to `lang-dang-subscribe@phenom.org'."
This is exactly what Armano did. He opened a new message in his email program, addressed it to "lang-dang-subscribe@phenom.org", (left both subject and body of the message empty,) and sent it.
Confirmations
Not very long later he received a message from the list server asking him to confirm his subscription. Armano replies to the message as requested.
This confirmation serves two main purposes. Firstly, it ensures that you really meant to be subscribed to the mailing list. It is at least thinkable (while being desirable in only few cases) that somebody else sent a subscription request using your email address (the server grabs that address to find out who to subscribe to the list). Secondly, sending the confirmatory mail you also prove that the email address does actually exist and somebody is reading the mail there. Otherwise, the mailing list server may end up sending lots of mail to addresses that do not exist, resulting in the messages bouncing back at the server (tactics have been developed to deal with this bounced mail).
Not all mailing lists require this confirmatory step; especially older lists can still be subscribed without this safeguard. Sometimes the tactics is to ask those who do not want to be subscribed to reply to the confirmation message and assume everybody else is happy with being a new member of the group.
The server has accepted Armano's confirmation and effectively added him to the subscriber list of lang-dang. This action results in another message being sent to Armano, this time telling him that his subscription request has been completed successfully.
Alternatives
The subscription method using any mail being sent to "lang-dang-subscribe@phenom.org" is very simple and forgiving. To be even more forgiving, Marina has set up many ways of subscribing. These "compatibility" modes mimic subscription methods employed by popular mailing list servers in wide-spread use.
Both Listserv and Majordomo as well as most probably any other list server software can be asked to add an email address to a mailing list by sending a message containing "subscribe <listname>" to the server address. For lang-dang, this could look like a message to "majorserv@phenom.org" with an empty subject and a body of "subscribe lang-dang". For Majordomo servers, the server address is often "majordomo@host.net", for Listserv surprisingly "listserv@host.net". "Subscribe" can be abbreviated to "Sub".
Majordomo server sometimes require you to mention the email address you want to be subscribed to the subscription request, right after the name of the list, resulting in a message body of "subscribe <listname> <emailaddress>" (e.g. "subscribe lang-dang semper@doubt.com"). Listserv lists, on the other hand, sometimes ask you to put your real name at that place: "subscribe <listname> <realname>" (e.g. "subscribe lang-dang Heinz Tschabitscher").
This is, admittedly, a bit confusing; usually, however, when you find a mailing list of interest to you you will also find proper subscription information at the same place. At the end of the mailing list series, there will also be a table listing the different commands you can send to the different mailing list servers.
Introduction
List Address and Server Address
Subscribing
Sending Messages and Replies
Unsubscribing
