E-Mail List Managers

Predating the Internet: LISTSERV

LISTSERV and other e-mail discussion lists or groups predate the Internet and the World Wide Web. These e-mail services met and continued to meet the needs and demands of a community that had computer access and did not necessarily have Internet access, even after the creation of the Internet and later the Web. The original version of the current LISTSERV program was created in the early 1980s in Europe and ran on the BITNET academic network using an IBM mainframe. Eric Thomas is credited with creating LISTSERV (although an earlier, simplified version was created in part by Ira Fuchs, Dan Oberst, and Ricky Hernandez). Thomas wanted an account in order to use the then-new IBM mainframe computers at a French university in Paris and offered to help the administration with security issues in exchange for a computer account. After he had the account, he significantly revised the existing LISTSERV program, which derived its name from the account name for e-mail lists in the Network Information Center at the university.

The management of the list was at first manual. A human handled subscriptions and unsubscriptions, as well as other functions. All of these functions are now handled automatically by an e-mail list management software program. These innovations came about because of the rapid increase in the number of lists generated, the increasing number of subscribers, longer delays in subscribing and unsubscribing, increased e-mail traffic across Europe, and a backlog of e-mail messages destined for the United States. Further innovations came about through comments and ideas shared on a LISTSERV list about the software. Additional revisions were needed during the mainframe crisis, when mainframe computing came to an end. It was at this time that Thomas formed the company L-Soft in the early 1990s, and LISTSERV became a registered trademark. LISTSERV was further revised to run on Windows and Linux operating systems.

[Page 250]The popularity of discussion lists has grown exponentially. In May 1988, there were 1,000 lists on LISTSERV, and as of March 2010, there were close to a half-million public lists. As large as these numbers appear, they are only a fraction of the total number of public lists, because other e-mail managing programs came into existence during these years. Anastasios Kotsikonas (Tasos) created Listproc for the UNIX operating system at Boston University in 1982, and Majordomo, a creation of Brent Chapman, had popular use by 1992. During the late 1990s up to 2001, several Web-based, e-mail discussion list services emerged, including eGroups (which later became Yahoo! Groups), Dada Mail, GNU Mailman, and Google Groups. Google Groups contains two components, one very similar to Usenet newsgroups and another that functions like the more traditional e-mail discussion list. Calculating the actual number of existing e-mail lists is nearly impossible. In addition to private companies like L-Soft and Yahoo! that provide public lists, many businesses, nonprofit organizations, governmental offices, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) keep their own private lists. Also, some programs, such as Majordomo and GNU Mailman, are free or open-source programs that any individual can download in order to generate and manage their own lists.

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