bukys@cs.rochester.edu (Liudvikas Bukys) (07/04/90)
I maintain a few mailing lists, and I'm sick of it. Surely someone has automated this so that users can add and remove themselves from lists? It's not that hard, but before I go ahead and do it myself, I'd like to know if it's been done. Does anyone know who the authors of the bitnet LISTSERV program are, whether its external specifications are available, whether its code is at all reusable? It seems like half of my mailing lists' requests for addition are in bitnet listserv format, so it seems like that would be a natural interface to emulate. Besides which, I've even heard (on the com-priv mailing list) that listserv supports such space-age features as per-user mailing list expansion privacy (for those who wish to join but don't want to have their names offered up to anybody who can telnet to the smtp port). IN SUMMARY: (1) Looking for automated mailing list maintenance software for Unix. (2) Looking for bitnet listserv documentation/authors. (3) Any other commentary/suggestions are welcome.
DLV@CUNYVMS1.BITNET (07/04/90)
Dear Liudvikas Bukys, The author and maintainer of LISTSERV is Eric Thomas, ERIC@SEARN.SUNET.SE (that's Sweden:). He's very busy all the time. The idea of having a LISTSERV on VAX/VMS or Unix has been around for a while; alas, it's much too complex to be easily ported (the program is written in REXX and depends on certain features of REXX that make it very hard to xlate it into anything else; an attempt to rewrite to for VMS has been abandoned, I hear). My advise to you would be either to take some existing unix mail archive server and change it to understand 'sub' and 'unsub' commands; or move your mailing lists to a CMS machine that runs LISTSERV. For example, I run rustex-l, a mailing list for discussing Russian text processing, and it's hosted in Buffalo (LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU). The postmaster there is very kind and hosts several other lists whose maintainers are not at Buffalo (e.g., BALT-L, about connecting the Baltic states to the network 'before Moscow':). You can get *some* documentation on LISTSERV by mailing 'INFO GENINTRO' to any listserv on the net. Best regards, D.Vulis