Generally anyone with e-mail can subscribe to these lists by sending a message to the appropriate system. To receive communica tions from a mailing list, any e-mail connection will work. There is no charge to be on a mailing list. The DEC equipment could accommodate the highly interactive nature of a bulletin board while the IBM systems were batch oriented and could support only mailing lists. Not all mailing lists are created equal.
Unmoderated lists send all message to all subscribers with out human intervention.
Most mailing lists are open and anyone can subscribe while others are restricted to individuals with a specific inter est and ability or need to partici pate. In summary, Moderated lists screen messages while Closed lists screen subscribers. If you learn how to interact with the listserv system, you will have access to literally thousands of mailing lists which utilize this software. Consequently, your request must be prepared in a very exact but straightforward format or the program will not understand the message. After sending in a request, you will receive either an acknowl edg ment that you are now a sub scriber and will begin to receive messages or an error message indicating something was wrong with your request so it could not be processed.