Building a High-Volume Newsletter Server
By Steven Champeon
We've come a long way from the early days of the Internet, when many "mailing lists" were simply multiuser aliases maintained by the postmaster of a UNIX server. In those days, it was common for such "list" aliases to have a "-L" suffix, so sys admins and users could easily tell the difference between user accounts and multiuser lists. Subscription was a matter of emailing the sys admin and asking to be added to the alias. All mail sent to the list alias was simply resent, or "exploded," to all the users on the alias.
As the lists grew, and as users and administrators demanded more complex and powerful features, it became clear that the world needed something better. Developers introduced software packages that became known as mailing list managers (MLMs), including the Perl-based Majordomo and the popular and powerful Listserv. As you might expect, given that Listserv predates the Web by over eight years, these early MLMs were managed via commands sent to specific email addresses. These programs were more than just a different way to reroute mail from one person to several. They offered advanced features such as digest mode (with which a list member could elect to receive all messages sent within a given time period at once, instead of individually), the ability to block certain people from sending mail to the list, and a wealth of other configuration options, including custom headers, footers, and filtering capabilities. Listserv is the more powerful of the two programs, placing more control in the hands of the user.
