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This is a guide to what email is and how to use it.
Electronic mail is the most widely used application on the Internet, and for good reason. What better way to communicate with so many people so quickly?In order to use and understand email properly, you will now learn how it's constructed, the playing rules and regulations (or Netiquette), and how email can be of use to you.
What makes up an email message? Most messages have two important parts, with a third part that doesn't have to appear. The first two parts are the header and the body of the message, and the third, non-essential part, is the signature.
The header is the electronic address or the "front of the envelope", if you will. To someone seeing it for the first time it can just look like a bunch of letters, numbers, and symbols. Basically, the header exists for the computers, not for the users, and you're lucky that you can read it as well as you can. In some programs you can see an abbreviated header, which is good, and in some cases you can ignore the header altogether, which can be a little dangerous because it may not be clear who receives a reply to that message.
Because the header is for computers to use to direct mail to you, I recommend that you choose an abbreviated header display if you have one. An abbreviated header shows you information that can be useful, such as who sent the email to you, when it was sent, what the subject of the message is, and to whom it was sent (not always only you -- it's easy to send the same piece of email to multiple people).
Take a look at a typical header, culled just now from one of my archived pieces of email
A sample header:
Let's take a look though all the different parts of the header, explaining each section of the header as we go
To: jbloggs@vicnet.net.au
From: jcitizen@vicnet.net.au
Date: Tue 02 Jan 1996 07:35:08 EDT
Subject: Victoria's Network
Cc: joannec@vicnet.net.au
Before we get started on the basics you should know that sometimes you might recieve a massage with lots of numbers and information you can sort of make out. You generally can ignore this part of the header, although it can be fun to see where your message went at times.
If your message bounces -- that is, if it fails to go though for some reason and comes back to you like returened mail;-- looking at this part in the header helps you determine how far it got and which machine didn't like it. More about how to handle bounces or returned mail after a while.
To: jbloggs@vicnet.net.au
The To line can have one or more entries, and it tells the computers to who to send the mail. The recipient may not be you because you might be the person mentioned in the Cc line or even the Bcc line (which you don't see because Bcc stands for Blind Carbon Copy). Most of the time you see a name before or after the email address, but it's not mandatory.
From: jcitizen@vicnet.net.auThe From line indicates who sent the email and is self-explanatory. Your real name may appear in brackets if you have entered this in the configuration of your email software.
Date: Tue 02 Jan 1996 07:35:08 EDT
The Date line lists the date that the email was originally sent, not the time you received it or read it, and should usually indicate the time zone in which the sender lives. Some messages use a number, either positive or negative, and the acronym GMT, which stands for Greenwich Mean Time. Unfortunately, this use requires that you know what time it is in Greenwich, England, and that you know how your local daylight savings time is involved. And being all the way down here in Australia...
Subject: Victoria's NetworkThe Subject line should give a clear and concise description of the contents of the email message. In practice, this description often isn't true, especially after a discussion proceeds, changing topics occasionally, with everyone using the reply function to keep the Subject the same. After a while the Subject line bears no resemblance to the contents of the message, at which point it's time to change the line.
Cc: joannec@vicnet.net.auThe Cc line lists all the people who received copies of the message. There is no functional difference from being on the To line or the Cc line, but in theory if you receive only a copy, the message shouldn't concern you as much. In practice I notice little difference.
This has been an example of an Abbreviated Header. An abbreviated header probably just shows these five lines and avoids displaying the routing information at the top of the header.
You also may see other lines in the header that identify which program mailed the message, to whom the recipients should reply, the type of data included in the message, how the data is encoded, and that sort of thing. In general, you don't have to worry about anything in the header very much, but it's worth taking a look every now and then to see if you can tell what's going on in there.
The body of the email is what you have to say. They way you say it is important as the written word doesn't always convey the same meanings as the spoken word. Here are a few tips and tricks to make your email enjoyable to read and easy to understand.
Email differs from normal mail in many ways. Think of the difference between a short note to your mother, a memo at work, and a formal business letter. Most email falls somewhere between the short note and the memo, and seldom do you ever see an email message with the formality and rigidity of a business letter. Although I'm giving this information in the context of email, it applies equally as well to postings on Usenet; so if you like, reread this section, substituting posting for email everywhere.
How do you start these messages? In many ways, email acts as the great equalizer. Most of the time, you know someone's name and email address when you send email to him, nothing more. busHR NOSHADEanger@outback.com.au could be a crocodile catcher, a work experience person, or the President of the U.S. Similarly, any address ending in edu can link to a student, some member of the staff, a world-renowned professor of underwater basket weaving, or the president of the university. You have no way of knowing, unless that fact somehow comes up in conversation.
Most people react to this lack of context by treating everyone with the same level of polite, but informal, respect. Seldom do people use their titles, so equally seldom do correspondents use those titles in email. Everyone is on a first-name basis and can benefit from this level of informality, just as the Internet does. In light of this knowledge, when I started using email I thought about the differences between email and paper mail (hereafter called by its true name in the Internet community, snail mail). The standard salutation of "Dear" sounds inappropriately formal and stilted to my ears (apologies to MissManners). Since email more closely resembles spoken communication than written, I opted for the less formal and more colloquial "Hi," which has served me well. Some people forego the salutation completely, relying solely on the first name, but that approach feels abrupt to me, as if someone called me on the phone and stated my name without a "Hello" or so much as a questioning tone. Do what you like, though; no one has laid down rules on this matter.
What you say in the letter itself deserves more thought, however. Because email is so quick and it's so easy to respond without thinking, many people often reply hastily and less politely than they would had they taken a moment to consider. Remember, you want to achieve a certain effect with an email message, just as you do with any form of communication. If you simply whack your first thoughts into a message, it probably won't properly convey your true feelings. If you want information from someone, pHR NOSHADEasing your request politely only increases your chances of getting that information, and if you wish to comment on someone else's words, doing so in a reasoned and level-headed manner ensures that that person won't immediately consider you a serious clown.
You also must remember that informal though email may be, it lacks most of the nonverbal parts of communication that we seldom consider in normal speech. All inflection, body language, and facial expressions disappear, and it doesn't help one whit if you make them while composing the letter. Email is ASCII text only, and only two ways exist to convey inflections such as sarcasm or irony that would be obvious in spoken conversation. First, polish your writing skills. There is no substitute for clear and concise writing. Many people find writing difficult, but I recommend that you don't think of composing email as writing, but as speaking to someone who sees your words but cannot see or hear you. Most people who claim they can't write have little trouble making themselves understood when speaking.
Second, utilize smileys, or as they are sometimes known, emoticons. Smileys are strings of punctuation characters meant to be viewed by tilting your head (which is usually easier than tilting your monitor) to the side. (If they still look wrong, try tilting your head to the other side.) People have come up with literally hundreds of different smileys, and you can find lists containing them on the Internet. Seth Godin has even compiled many of them into a book, The Smiley Dictionary, published by Peachpit Press (and there is at least one other book, published by O'Reilly & Associates, on the same somewhat silly topic). I take the view that only two, or maybe three, smileys are at all useful in normal email. The first is the happy face :-), which implies that what you just said was meant as humor or at least shouldn't be taken too seriously. I often use it to imply that I would have said that bit with a smile. A variant of the happy face uses the semicolon instead of the colon ;-) and (because of the wink) implies that the preceding sentence was somewhat sarcastic or ironic. Finally, the frowning face :-( implies that you aren't happy about whatever you just said.
I use smileys relatively heavily in email, where I don't have time to craft each letter as carefully as I would like. I miss not being able to use them (I could, but no one would understand) in snail mail occasionally. When in doubt, use smileys. If I say in email, "Well, that was a stupid thing to do," the message is much more offensive than if I say, "Well, that was a stupid thing to do. :-)" Believe me, it is.
I may have given the impression that the Internet is this utopia where everyone always behaves nicely and ne'er is heard a discouraging word. Unfortunately, that's not so, and in reality you see plenty of flaming on the nets. Flaming happens when, in a PC discussion list, you innocently mention that you like your Amiga, and 17 people immediately jump on you in email and pummel you within an inch of your electronic life for saying something so obviously stupid and incorrect when everyone knows that only weenies, wimps, and little wusses use those toy Macintosh computers, which are good only for paperweights -- and expensive paperweights at that, because you can buy three completely configured, top-of-the-line Pentium-based PCs for the same price as a used Amiga -- without a hard drive. And by the way, did I mention that your mother wears combat boots and your father wears ballet slippers? :-)
The preceding paragraph is flaming (except for the smiley, which I tHR NOSHADEew in to indicate that I was kidding about your parents'footwear), and if you must respond to an inflammatory message, which I don't recommend, do it in email. No one else wants to read your flames. Think before you lower yourself to flaming; it never solves anything. I have found in almost every case that replying calmly and clearly embarrasses anyone (assuming that person is normal and rational, which is not always a good assumption) so thoroughly that she immediately apologizes for being such a clown. And yes, I know how hard it is not to just tee off on someone. Restrain yourself and rest assured that everyone who sees your restraint will think more highly of you for it.
Often, people flame companies or large organizations that are doing stupid things. Various governments are favorite, though slow-moving and not very challenging, targets. This sort of flaming is more acceptable, although you may start a flame war if other people don't share your opinions on some major topic, such as whether the Mac is better than Windows. As a spectator, you may enjoy watching the occasional flame war, as I do, but again, they never solve anything, and they waste a huge amount of bandwidth (which is composed of transmission time, people time, and disk storage thoughout the world).
Keep in mind that no matter what you say, it may not be private. Always assume that gobs of people can and do read every message you send. These people include your coworkers, your system administrator, system administrators on other machines though which your email travels, random pimply-faced fools who like poking around in other people's email, and last, but certainly not least, the government, probably in the form of the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, or National Security Agency. I realize this sounds alarming, and it is most certainly not completely true, but the possibility exists for all of these people to read your email.
In reality, email carries significant privacy, but because you have no guarantee of that privacy, you should stay aware of what you're saying. This suggestion is especially true if you use email at work, where you could lose your job over ill-considered remarks in email. It's always a good idea to check on your employer's policy about email privacy.
This lack of privacy carries over to mailing lists and Usenet news (where you want people to read your messages, but you may not want the government to keep tabs on your postings). In fact, some people have gone so far as to include inflammatory keywords in otherwise innocuous postings, just to trip up the rumored government computers scanning for terrorists, assassins, space aliens, nudists, vegetarians, people who like broccoli, and other possible undesirables.
The coolest thing I think about email is attachments. Many people like to send each other files in email, and although you can do this by simply encoding the file as BinHex or uucodeand pasting it into the body of the message, modern email programs instead enable you to merely attach the file to the message with a specific command. That's all fine and nice if your recipient also uses an email program that knows how to deal with the attachment, but if not, your friend sees the file, usually encoded in BinHex or uucode, at the end of the message in the body (but before the signature). Large email files can be a pain to deal with unless your email program supports attachments. Eudora does.
Signatures are just about what you'd expect -- some text that goes at the bottom of every message you send; many email programs, including Eudora, provide a facility for creating signatures. Most people include their names (real or pretend) in their signatures; it's considered good form to include your preferred email address in your signature as well, just in case the address in the header isn't useful for some reason or another. After you get past the essentials of name and email address, however, you can put anything you like in your signature. Many people lean toward clever quotations or manage to express somesporting partisanship of their favorite team, usually with an erudite "Come one all you Maine Road Blues"or some such. (It's hard to grunt in ASCII.) I prefer clever quotations, especially so if changed once per day -- not that I have time or energy to think them up or type them in every day. Here is a signature that must have taken some time to create, because all the lines and dashes had to be typed in the right place:
///////
~ ~ ///
(/ @ @ /)
+-------------------------oOOo-(_)-oOOo---------------------------------+
CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY, CAREFUL WHAT YOU TYPE...
They're always listening!
snow.white@xxxxx.edu.au
Phone +61 3 9355 5555 Fax +61 3 9355-5555
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
Many people also use signatures to disclaim their messages. The signature acts as a disclaimer, usually stating that the opinions and facts stated in the preceding message have no relationship to the organization paying for the account or employing the individual. Disclaimers are important online because readers have no context in which to take postings. If Karla the kangaroo posts a glowing review of specific species of cork tree, for example, she should also note at the bottom of her review that she is a paid consultant of Corking Good Times International, and is therefore biased. More common are glowing reviews from users who "have no relationship with Corking Good Times International, other than as a satisfied customer." Disclaimers also serve to ensure that no one takes the words of a single employee as the policy of the entire organization. Marketing departments hate that. "But Joe said online that Apple was going to give free Macs to everyone whose birthday falls on the second Tuesday of odd months this year." "Yeah, sure buddy."
One warning, though. Mailing lists that are published as digests -- that is, lists in which a moderator collects the day's messages and concatenates them into a single file -- frown on or even reject postings with multiple line signatures. This suggestion makes sense, if you think about it. A large digest file can have 50 messages in it, and if every person has a four-line signature, the digest suddenly becomes 200 lines longer than necessary. But enough about signatures, let's look at the meat of the message.
In a perfect world, all email would get though to its destination quickly and reliably. But just as with snail mail, which can take one to five days to appear, and which sometimes never appears at all, email isn't perfect, and sometimes it will bounce back to you. At times the machine that bounced the mail back to you will give you a hint as to what went wrong, but more often you're on your own.
The most common reason for a bounced message is a typo somewhere in the address. That's one reason that short email addresses are good -- they're easier to type and thus less likely to be mistyped. The first thing to do when you get a bounce is to look though the header of the original message (the full headers are usually returned to you) and make sure you typed the address properly. Everyone makes this mistake on occasion.
A common error message in bounced email is "User unknown." This means that the email arrived at the proper machine, which searched though its list of users and decided that it didn't have a user with the name that you used. Again, this is most commonly due to a typo in the userid, although sometimes there are problems on the destination machine that have caused it to forget about a user, possibly temporarily. After checking the address, try resending the message, especially if you've gotten mail though to that address before.
Along with unknown users, you may see error messages complaining about "Host unknown." This is a more serious error that's more difficult to work around if it's not simply a typo. The basic problem is that for some reason one machine, perhaps your host machine or perhaps one further along in the path to the destination, was unable to contact the destination machine. There's not much you can do in this case other than try again a little later, in the hope that the machine you're mailing to has come back up.
One thing to watch out for is that sometimes the header provides an incorrect address to your email program, but the person includes the proper one in their signature. If you have trouble replying to a message, and the address you're replying to is different from an address listed in the signature, try using the signature address instead.
Note: I find this trick especially useful if the address in the signature is simple, whereas the address from the header is long and convoluted. Simple addresses seem to be more reliable, on the whole, although that's not a hard and fast rule.
All email programs share some basic features that you need in order to quickly and efficiently read, reply, and store your email. However, after these basic commonalities, the differences between programs mount quickly. Vicnet recommends Eudora or Eudora Lite.
An email program should enable you to display and scroll though an email message easily. If you're using a Macintosh, you should be able to do all the standard Macintosh things to text in a window, such as copying and pasting into a different program, resizing the window to display more text, selecting all the text with a single command, and that sort of thing.
Although you usually can choose the font and size in which you view messages in Macintosh email programs, I recommend that you stick to a monospaced font such as Monaco or Courier. People on the Internet must format tables and graphics with spaces, and monospaced fonts such as Monaco and Courier display these tables and graphics properly.
Proportionally spaced fonts such as Times and Helvetica don't work as well because the characters in these fonts can have different widths, with a lowercase i being thinner than an uppercase W. Few of these features are generally available with a Unix mail program; that's one of the major advantages of using the Mac.
Another important feature of an email program is the manner in which it enables you to move between messages, save messages in different mailboxes, and delete unwanted messages after you've read them. Most email programs display a list of the messages in an In Box area, and some indicate which messages you have already read, replied to, or saved to disk. Opening a message usually opens a new window to display the message, and sometimes closing the window (with or without deleting the current message) opens the next unread message -- a nice feature for those who receive a great deal of mail. Being able to sort the list of messages is useful, and you should be able to select multiple messages at once to move them to another mailbox or delete them.
Speaking of multiple mailboxes, all email programs should support them, though unfortunately not all do. Most people want to save some of the messages they receive, so a program should allow you to create your own mailboxes for filing away messages on different topics. Of course, if you can create a new mailbox, the email program should enable you to do everything you can do in your In Box to the messages stored in a personal mailbox. Eudora does this.
While you're managing your email, you will undoubtedly want to delete many of the messages you receive. Eudora enables you to trash a file without actually immediately deleting it. The easier it is to delete a message (and it should be very easy since you're likely to eventually want to delete most of the mail you receive), the more likely you will eventually delete something accidentally. If the email program deletes immediately, your message is toast. The other advantage of the two-stage (where a message is put in a trash can before being deleted later) or a delayed delete (where a message is marked as being deleted but isn't actually deleted until you close the mailbox) is that you then don't have to put up with an annoying confirmation dialog box every time you delete a message.
Some of your messages may, in fact, contain programs or other files that you want to save to a normal file. A few email programs automatically detect attachments encoded in certain formats (more about file formats later) and decode such messages on their own. But one way or another, you need a simple way to save the message you're looking at without copying and pasting the entire thing into a word processor.
Much of the mail you receive requires a reply of some sort, so an email program should make replying extremely easy, either with a command key shortcut or a single click on an icon. An email program also should facilitate quoting the original message, or prefixing each line with one or two special characters, usually a greater-than symbol and a space. Using quoting, you can easily include some of the message you're replying to so that the recipient has some context to know what you're talking about. A nice feature is the ability to select just a certain part of the original message and have the email program quote only that selected text in the reply and ignore the rest of the original message
Because an email message may have originally been sent to several people, an email program should give you the option of replying only to the sender or to all the people to whom the message was originally sent. At the same time, it ideally should make sure that you see the eyecatching lines in the header. I've spawned a couple of embarrassing scenes by forwarding a message to a friend, and when my friend replied to me, his email program saw that mine had included the original message's address in the Reply-To line in the header. So his reply, instead of going just to me, went back to the sender, which was a mailing list that went to thousands of people. Oops! Luckily, I didn't say anything embarrassing and neither did he, so we were safe, but that's a good example of how two computer professionals who know better could have been thoroughly embarrassed in public. Think of this situation as standing up in a crowded restaurant and shouting loudly that your underwear has holes. You get the idea.
More powerful email programs provide features that can automatically mark or reply to email based on the contents of the header or the body of the incoming message. They often generalize these features so that you can essentially run a mailserver, which sends out requested information automatically via email. You also can use this sort of feature to run a simple mailing list, which takes a message to a certain local address and forwards it automatically to a list of subscribers.
When replying to email and when creating new mail, an email program should provide all the features that you're used to when you're writing with a word processor. Eudora does....
I think that any email program should make it easy to save a copy of everything you write, preferably automatically. I send more email than most people, but I like to be able to go back on occasion and see what I said, forward a message to someone who lost it, or just browse though the thoughts that appeared in my writings at that time. Why bother to keep a diary if you're writing about most of what happens in your life in email to friends?
Finally, whenever you create email, your email program should enable you to send the mail to a nickname or alias, which is merely another, easier-to-remember form of an email address. So instead of typing karla-the kangaroo@outback.com.au every time you want to send that person email, you can type the shorter karla. Be careful with nicknames because it's easy to create more than you can easily remember, at which point they don't particularly help any more. Defining nicknames for everyone you might ever send email to is a waste of time; settle for defining a nickname only after you decide that you are likely to send that person email frequently.
Now you know how an email program should work and how to read email addresses when you see them littering up this book and the nets in general. But how do you find people to write to? Finding people to write to depends on what you're looking for. There are two types of people -- those you know and those you haven't yet met. The latter group makes up most of the world, and in some respects, they are the easiest to find and talk to because you don't really care who specifically you end up talking to. After all, you don't know any more about one stranger over another, so who you talk to makes no difference.
You can only talk email people who have email accounts. So when you start out writing college buddies or sending Birthday cards, include your email address and soon those who have it will use it. Those who don't will think of your address as one more reason why they should be connected.
How do you find the address of someone who you know and you know they use email? The simplest and most effective method -- use the telephone and ask them. This method, low-tech though it may be, has the advantage of being quick, accurate, and easy. Of course, it does ruin the surprise value of that first email note. Such is life. You do need to know your friend's telephone number, or failing that, her address so you can call the all-knowing information computers at the phone company. If you don't even know where your friend lives, she may be trying to hide from you anyway after that ugly incident a while back.
"Aha!" you say, "If the all-knowing phone company computers can give me my friend's telephone number, aren't there all-knowing computers on the Internet that can give me my friend's email address?" Nice try, and good question, but the answer is, unfortunately, maybe. Some computers know what users they support, and you can find some information via services called Finger, Whois, X.500, Ph, Knowbot, and various others, but that information doesn't help unless you already know what machine to search. Several attempts have been made at linking various directory services on different machines, but I've never found them to be the slightest bit useful. The problem is twofold. First, hooking a local directory of users to an Internet-wide directory requires some effort and certain standards, and inertia being what it is, that effort isn't always made, and the standards don't exist. Second, many organizations shield their users from the outside world for reasons of security and privacy. These shields also make it difficult to determine how many people actually use the Internet.
Note: Frankly, because I find these services so completely useless, I'm not going to bother to discuss them further. That said, if you crave some frustration, go to the University of Minnesota's Gopher server at gopher.tc.umn.edu (the Home Gopher server by default, if you use TurboGopher), select Phone Books, and then check out the various different options available for searching for Internet email addresses. If you know the organization in question, and they have a Phone Book server, that's the best start -- otherwise you're on your own. The main thing you miss via the Gopher route is the Knowbot Information Service. To access it, telnet to info.cnri.reston.va.us 185 and type help to see the possible commands.
Finding new friends is easy on the Internet. You don't know people beforehand, so communicating with them in a discussion list via email or news requires nothing in terms of opening lines or trivial small talk about the fallibility of weather forecasters. If you have something to contribute to a discussion, or perhaps if you merely want to make a private comment to one of the people in the discussion, meeting him is as easy as replying to his message. Whether that first contact grows beyond a one-time message depends on many variables, but with so many people, finding correspondents on the net doesn't take long.
As much as meeting people may be easy, finding them again after some time often proves more difficult. You may not remember where a person lives, if you ever knew, and if it's in the United States at all; you probably don't know his telephone number; and frankly, you may not even remember how to spell his name. And yet, all too often I've had long, involved conversations that eventually trail off after several weeks or months, and then I don't hear from that person again. If I haven't saved a message (which contains the all-important email address in the header) or recorded his email address somewhere, I have to hope that my friend has better organizational systems than I do.
I suggest that you figure out some way to keep track of your correspondents' email addresses. Nickname features work well although they may prove unwieldy as a storage mechanism later on. If that's true, I recommend using a standard database or address book program that can handle extra fields for email addresses. This advice may sound obvious, but I can't tell you how many times I've lost an address that I wanted several months later. These days I keep a copy of every piece of email I send, in part so I can search that file, large though it may be, for email addresses that have escaped my short-term memory.
There's no accounting for taste, and similarly, there's no accounting for different interests. I may be interested in softball, camping and hiking, and crossstitch, whereas the next person might favor The Simpsons, aviation, and Irish culture. As a result, discussion groups have sprung up around almost every imaginable topic, and if your area of interest isn't represented, it's not too difficult to start your own group. These groups take two forms: mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups.
The beauty of mailing lists is that they cover specific topics and they come straight to you, without any extra work on your part. If you find yourself interested in a topic, you can subscribe to the appropriate mailing list, and all the traffic comes directly to your electronic mailbox. This system makes participating in many mailing lists easy, even if you have only email access to the Internet; Usenet access may require more money and effort. Luckily for those of you who cannot get Usenet access, many mailing lists and newsgroups mirror each other.
Mailing lists have several other advantages over Usenet news. Email is ubiquitous on the Internet, whereas access to news is far less common (although certainly widespread). Because of the way Usenet news propagates thoughout the nets, mailing lists often arrive faster than any given posting in a newsgroup. Because mailing lists arrive in your electronic mailbox, they may seem less intimidating than large newsgroups with many participants. And frankly, many of us who lead busy lives find mailing lists easier to keep up with because we don't have to run another program to read the list, whereas reading news always requires leaving that ubiquitous email program and running a newsreader.
Note: You may wonder why LISTSERV doesn't have an E at the end and why it is spelled with all capitals. LISTSERV software has existed for some time on IBM mainframes that run the VM/CMS operating system. This operating system limits userids to eight characters (hence the missing E), and because the operating system itself was originally not case sensitive, all commands and program names have traditionally been typed in uppercase only. The name also may have had something to do with early computer terminals not supporting lowercase, but I can't prove that theory. Just believe me -- by convention, LISTSERVs are always addressed in the uppercase, although it doesn't matter any more.
Along with the different mailing list manager programs, you may have to deal with two other variables related to mailing lists -- moderation and digests. Each of these possibilities slightly changes how you interact with the list, so let's look at each in turn and then go over the Essentials of using the list manager software as a subscriber.
I suspect many mailing lists started out unmoderated, which means that anyone was able to send a message on any topic (whether or not it was appropriate to the group) to the list. The list software then distributed that message to the entire list. You see the problem already -- no one wants to read a bunch of messages that have nothing to do with the topic or discussion at hand. Similarly, if a discussion is spinning out of control and turning into a flame war, it's just a waste of time for many people.
Thus was born the concept of the moderated mailing list. To stem inappropriate postings, a moderator reads all the postings before they go out to the group at large and decides which are appropriate. Moderated groups tend to have less traffic, and the messages that go though are guaranteed by the moderator to have some worth. This system is good.
On the downside, moderated groups occasionally run into sticky issues of censorship because the moderator may not always represent the views of the majority of the readers. Moderator positions are volunteer only; I've never heard of a mailing list that elected a moderator, although it's certainly possible, particularly among lists that carry traffic associated with a professional organization.
I see no reason to choose to read or not read a mailing list based on its moderation until you've spent a while seeing what goes on in the group. I subscribeto various lists, some moderated, some not, and on the whole, both have their place. Keep in mind, though, that if you post to a moderated list, the moderator may reject your posting. Don't feel bad, but do ask why so that your future submissions stand a better chance of reaching the rest of the group. On the other hand, when posting to an unmoderated group, try to stick to appropriate topics because people hate hearing about how you like your new car in alist devoted to potbellied pigs. Too many misdirected postings to a list may agitate list members to the point of asking for a moderator to limit the discussion.
When the number of messages in a mailing list increases to a certain level, many lists consider creating a digest version of the list. A digest is simply a single message that contains all the individual messages concatenated in a specific way. Why bother with a digest? Depending on how your email program works, you might find it awkward to receive and read as many as 30 messages a day, especially if your email service, such as AppleLink, charges you a per-message fee to receive email. Just think how many messages you may have waiting after a week of vacation. If the messages are sent in digest form, a mailing list becomes easier to handle for some people because you get one big message instead of lots of little messages.
Unfortunately, digests have problems too. Some email gateways to commercial services limit the size of incoming email messages. Thus, digest mailing lists like the Info-Mac Digest, one of the most popular Macintosh mailing lists, can range in size from 30K to over 100K, so very few issues of the digest sneak though the gateways with size limitations. In addition, you may find it easier to read (or skip though) small individual messages, whereas scrolling though a 100K file can take quite a bit of time and can be extremely awkward with some email programs. To add to the complication, certain email programs can break up a digest into its individual messages for easier viewing. I'm talking the email equivalent of digestive enzymes here.
You must decide for yourself whether a digest is easier or harder to work with, but only with some groups do you have any choice. The LISTSERV and ListProcessor software sometimes provide an option that you can set to switch your subscription to a mailing list from individual messages to a single, usually daily, digest. I don't believe you can toggle this option for Majordomo-based lists, but Majordomo list administrators can set up a separate list that sends out a digest -- you would simply subscribe to the separate (digest) list instead. These separate digest lists in Majordomo generally have "-digest" appended to the listname.
Since you're likely to use email heavily, I hope you've gotten a sense for how it works, the sorts of things you shouldn't do with it, what an email program should do for you, and what it makes possible in terms of mailing lists. There are thousands of mailing lists available on the Internet, and you can find some wonderful discussions.
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