mailing list n.
(often shortened in context to `list') 1. An email address that is an alias (or macro, though that word is never used in this
connection) for many other email addresses. Some mailing lists
are simple `reflectors', redirecting mail sent to them to the
list of recipients. Others are filtered by humans or programs of
varying degrees of sophistication; lists filtered by humans are
said to be `moderated'. 2. The people who receive your email when
you send it to such an address.
Mailing lists are one of the primary forms of hacker
interaction, along with Usenet. They
predate Usenet, having originated with the first UUCP and ARPANET
connections. They are often used for private information-sharing
on topics that would be too specialized for or inappropriate to
public Usenet groups. Though some of these maintain almost purely
technical content (such as the Internet Engineering Task Force
mailing list), others (like the `sf-lovers' list maintained for
many years by Saul Jaffe) are recreational, and many are purely
social. Perhaps the most infamous of the social lists was the
eccentric _bandykin_ distribution; its latter-day progeny,
_lectroids_ and _tanstaafl_, still include a number of
the oddest and most interesting people in hackerdom.
Mailing lists are easy to create and (unlike Usenet) don't tie
up a significant amount of machine resources (until they get very
large, at which point they can become interesting torture tests
for mail software). Thus, they are often created temporarily by
working groups, the members of which can then collaborate on a
project without ever needing to meet face-to-face. Much of the
material in this lexicon was criticized and polished on just such
a mailing list (called `jargon-friends'), which included all the
co-authors of Steele-1983.