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Email via Distribution Lists: When You Know the Subject--Not the People

Imagine sending a letter not specifically to "James and Joyce," but rather to "everybody who is really interested in antiques." That's what happens with public email distribution lists.

Many of these email distribution lists use automated software, so you sign on and off with a standard message to a particular address. The smaller distribution lists have posting addresses, and everything sent there by a subscriber gets automatically forwarded to the entire subscriber list. The larger distribution lists have one or more moderators who filter the mail and perhaps put the best postings together into "digest" messages.

A public email distribution list's audience is typically a few hundred people and sometimes as large as a few thousand. The larger the subscriber group, the more likely the list will have moderator; otherwise, you could get so many emails from the group that they became a nuisance rather than a help.

How do you find these public email distribution lists? Go to "Liszt, the mailing list directory" www.liszt.com. (That's not a typo; this site spells its name like the name of the Hungarian composer). The searchable directory includes over 90,000 public email lists that you can join. This Web site also provides a recommended subset, organized by category.

Search Liszt for "antiques," and you'll find four matches. Click on the category "business," then "shopping," and you'll find:

• Giftgiving: help for the gift-giving challenged (e.g., helping men find gift ideas for women.)
• The Internet Cheapskate Newsletter: information on free and cheap Internet services.
• McDonaldSv: surplus items for office, home, work, at low prices.
• RummageFun: for selling anything and everything, like a big yard or rummage sale.
• Shopping: weekly updates of online shopping opportunities.

Newsgroups: Reach Out to an Even Broader Community

With newsgroups (known to pre-Web Internet veterans as "Usenet newsgroups"), you post a message to a group, using either a special newsgroup software, email, or a web-based service. The audience for a particular group might be tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of readers, but most of the postings are likely to come from the same handful of outspoken and prolific writers. The messages are stored on numerous "news servers" (computers around the world that have been set up on a volunteer basis for the dedicated purpose of acting as the hardware hosts of newsgroups.

Postings are typically available for about four to eight weeks, depending on the policies and whims of the folks who run the servers. The discussions are usually "threaded," similar to forums, where the newsgroup's subject line makes clear one messages is in response to another one, and so on. The most useful messages often get posted to multiple newsgroups, forwarded over email distribution lists, and eventually posted on the Web by fans, sometimes at multiple Web sites.

Liszt also has a newsgroup directory. But the most comprehensive source of information about newsgroups is Deja.com (www.deja.com). On peak days, this Web site processes over a million postings from hundreds of thousands of people to over 50,000 different newsgroups. [This number keeps growing.]

Click on "New Users" at the bottom of Deja's first page for information on how to get the most out of their free service. This Web site makes it easy for you to find and read the items you want and also to post items to any of these groups. Some examples of advice or information you can post requested responses for are as varied as looking for a rare collectible or seeking advice on what DVD system to buy.

Okay. You've become a shopping guru. Why not use the money you've saved to throw a party for the friends you've met online? If you live in far-flung locations, arrange to "rendezvous" at a vacation spot. To work out your travel plans, maybe hold a weekly chat or carry on your discussion in a forum.