List Administration

If you promote your list, and mention it often on your Web site, you should see the list membership grow slowly but steadily. On most discussion lists, there will be few or no messages posted at first, so you may choose to prime the pump a little by submitting some appropriate questions and answers yourself. In fact, most lists don't really start to take off until they reach a certain critical mass of at least a couple of hundred subscribers. In my experience, this almost always happens in the same way, and it's rather interesting for the student of human nature.

Here's what usually happens. You set up a new list, and people start subscribing, but no one posts any messages. Once the list grows to two or three hundred members, somebody posts a question, and perhaps even elicits an answer or two. Suddenly about a dozen people send indignant messages asking why in the world they are getting these messages, and demanding to be removed from the list instantly! As long as no one was posting, they didn't realize they were on the list, but now they're hopping mad.

Why does this happen? Theoretically it's difficult or impossible to subscribe someone else without their consent, and names do not simply add themselves. The fact is, however, that on every discussion list, a certain number of people will get signed up who don't want to be, and may in fact have no idea what a mailing list is or how it works. Perhaps some of them confused the act of signing up for a mailing list with the act of registering on a Web site. Perhaps some thought they were signing up to win a color TV. Perhaps some of them are just plain stupid. I really don't know how it happens, but it most certainly does, and managing unwilling list members is one of the most important, and sometimes exasperating, tasks for the list admin.

As many of you may have noticed, receiving unsolicited email sends some people right off the deep end. You'd think that their email access was costing them a hundred bucks a second, the way some of them carry on (in fact, in many countries, Internet access is charged by the minute, at very expensive rates). Now, everyone who is familiar with mailing lists knows that if you wish to unsubscribe from a list, you send an unsubscribe message to the "command" address (for example, majordomo@companyname.com), not to the list itself. But of course the folks we're talking about don't know that, and can't be bothered to figure it out. They will send messages to the list itself, demanding to be removed. Some will send dozens of messages, and some will use very colorful, belligerent and obscene language.

These annoying and completely useless messages are going to every member of the list, and if there are a lot of them, the list itself becomes an irritating piece of crap instead of a useful resource. If this goes on too long, your valued readers will start unsubscribing themselves in droves. They want to be on the list, but they want to read about whatever the subject of the list is, not a bunch of vulgar language and death threats. Therefore, one of the most important tasks of the list admin is to nip this kind of thing in the bud. Keep a close watch on your list, and when someone sends a message to the list asking to be removed, manually remove him/her at once. Don't bother trying to explain how mailing lists work, or rebuking them for their rudeness. Get 'em out the door fast.

The Life Cycle of a Discussion List
Email-based Public Relations, or Mailing Lists for Web Sites
List Spammers