Re: Looking for a new home.

Aaron P Teske <Mithramuse+@CMU.EDU> said...
>
>What exactly is involved in running a list, anyway?
>
>		     Aaron Teske
>		     Mithramuse+@cmu.edu 

Depends on the type of list.  I'll start from teh begining, and walk
through 
the steps.

1) For just a couple of people, email aliases work well.  This means
everytime someone is added or dropped, everyone must update their
alias.	Again, only good for small numbers.

2) If you have access to a machine you can edit the sendmail aliases
file on, you can run an exploder type alias.  This basically means a
line in the aliases file that mail to that address gets resent out to
everyone on the list.  THis works well for medium sized lists, but
after a while the trouble of adding and deleting people by hand gets
to be a lot of work

3) The final step is to go with a software package to handle the list,
majordomo or listserv being the most common.  This is more work to set
up, but once done the list software handles a lot of the maint. for
you.  You generally still have to deal with wierd address or broken
stuff though.

So in general, its easy to run a small list, while a bigger list takes
work.  It requires you to have a machine to run the list on, and the
access
to install the software you need.  Then some amount of time a week to do
maint.
I find, for the two 300+ people lists I run, I spend a couple of hours a
week
fixing bad email addresses and answering routine questions.  Some weeks
less,
and some weeks more if soome thing major goes wrong.  

If anyone has more specific questions, I can try to answer them in
private email.

-=- Matthew L. Seidl		email: seidl@cs.colorado.edu		
   =-=
=-= Graduate Student			Project . . . What Project?	
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=-= and trying not to be too homesick for the BA	 -Morrow Quotes 
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