Creating A Mailing List
Written by Mel Gorman
Skynet offers a service for users who wish to create their own mailing list. To get a list created, mail mailman /at/ skynet /dot/ ie with the name of the requested list, why it should be created and should it be private or public.
A private list means that it will not appear on the main mailing list page and only list members can read the list archives.
Lists should not be created simply for the purposes of sending jokes as it's a waste of bandwidth.
The administrator of the mailing list and the password for admin privileges will be mailed to the requestor of the list as well as instructions on how to access or post to the list.
It is up to them to decide what the policy of the list should be. Policy for example is whether anyone can join the list or must they be approved first. Another example is if anyone can post to the list or must they be subscribed first.
The amount of traffic going through the list will be monitored periodically. Note that this does not mean an admin of skynet will be reading the mail. It means that we will send a warning if there is a huge amount of traffic being sent by the list which can be seen by reading logs.
A huge amount of traffic would be if someone sent a 20MB attachment to it. Remember that each mail sent to the list will be duplicated for every member of the list. So a 1MB mail (which is large) sent to a list of 100 people will generate 100MB of network traffic, which is a lot of mail.
