Many businesses, including those in the information industry, have found great value in using email lists. Certainly the use of announcement lists can get information to customers more quickly and less costly than paper mail, at least for email-literate customers. In addition, vendors are setting up customer lists, designed specifically for getting feedback from users and for troubleshooting problems. In addition to using the Web page to subscribe to lists, it can also be used to unsubscribe from them. Retrieving information that has appeared on a mailing list continues to be problematic.
Some lists have excellent archives on the Web that can be searched and browsed.
Others have archives that must be searched via email or with other arcane commands. Other lists may have archives that are only accessible to the list owner, moderator, or mailing list hosting company. For unarchived lists, one solution is to subscribe and archive the list locally. With the declining prices of hard disk space and the availability of high capacity storage media including Zip and Jaz disks, tape, and CD-R, storing thousands of simple text email messages takes up only a fraction of the available space on today's computers. Some companies, especially in the information technology industry, have set up their own news server with specialized newsgroups that do not propagate to other news servers.