🚀 go-pugleaf

 In article <822537146_OASIS_@swampdog.demon.co.uk>
  guy@swampdog.demon.co.uk (Guy Harrison) wrote

>What exactly is listserver?
At it's simplest it is a program that automatically sends out email sent to
one address to all subscribers on a mailing list. Effectively it is like a
very small scale news group, useful for subject areas not likely to have
enough interest to form a news group - or if for any reason subscriptions
are only going to be allowed to certain people.

 In article <822382326_OASIS_@flinny.demon.co.uk>
  Nick@flinny.demon.co.uk (Nicholas Flintham) said:-

>Hmm wouldn't a list server over a modem link be a funny.. most list 
>servers are run by unix machines at uni's which are connected to the 
>net all the time.. when a post gets sent to the address the mail gets 
>forwarded to everone on the list.. doing this via a modem would be a 
>bit expensive, the way I see it you would have to download the post 
>put all the peoples addresses on the list into a forwarded message 
>then upload the message again this would be possible I suppose but I 
>wouldn't like the phonebill to go with a busy list :->
>
Dead right, but there are quite a few smaller lists run over dial-up links.
So long as the number of subscribers is low and they can be expected not
to send unreasonably large mails, the extra on line time needed to run it
is little more than that you would use by adding one newsgroup with about
the same amount of traffic.
Servers with leased lines process incoming mail once every thirty minutes
or so, but the ones over dial-up connections manage quite well limiting
themselves to once ever 24 or 48 hours. (Some only send out email weekly
or even fortnightly). A lot of on-line time is saved sending out a digest
of the mail received - ie. one long email rather than lots of individual
short ones. This email only has to be sent from your machine once, though
the mail gateway may take a few seconds checking each subscriber.

If and when the thing gets too big to handle, you've got all the support or
evidence you'd need to start a specialist news group or alternatively
persuade a college/university site that the list was worth taking on. :)

Odds are that a list kept at a sensible size would have nowhere near the
unhealthy effect on the phone bill as all those nntp kicks we're having to
put up with at the moment!