Re: Change to netCDF mailing list management

> Organization: MIT
> Keywords: 199503092041.AA26364

Hi Fred,

>  >   To subscribe to the netcdfgroup mailing list:
>  >          subscribe netcdfgroup address@hidden.domain
>  
> Don't you want to tell people to write:
> 
>       subscribe netcdfgroup Joe Smith

No, we're using majordomo, not LISTSERV.  We evaluated LISTSERV and have
some good reasons for using majordomo instead.

   For a good comparison of various mailing list managers (MLM's)
   there's a good review by Norm Aleks. Send mail to
   "address@hidden" with the body "get file MLM-comparison" in the
   body of the message.
   
Here's the message you get if you try that sort of subscription request

    >>>> subscribe mjdtest Russ Rew
    **** subscribe: LISTSERV-style request failed
    This looks like a BITNET LISTSERV style 'subscribe' request, because the
    part after the list name doesn't look like an email address; it looks
    like a person's name.  Majordomo is not LISTSERV.  In a Majordomo
    'subscribe' request, the part after the list name is optional, but if
    it's there, it should be an email address, NOT a person's real name.

You might wonder if we will now gradually lose the association between
people's email names and their real names by letting majordomo handle the
mailing list.  That may happen, but some people like to subscribe to mailing
lists without revealing their real names, and some subscriptions are for
aliases that have no associuated real names, since the alias is for another
local mailing list of several people.

--Russ