From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
mailing list \mailing list\ n.
A list of names and addresses to which advertising,
solicitations of money, or other materials material sent in
large quantities is mailed; -- it is usually used by
comercial or charitable organizations. Mailing lists are
often sold by organizations to other organizations, and are
frequently used for targeted mailing, i. e., mailing to
groups of people who are more likely htan the general
population to respond as desired to the message in the mail.
[WordNet 1.5 +PJC]
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
mailing list
n 1: a list of names and addresses to which advertising material
is mailed
From The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003) [jargon]:
mailing list
n.
(often shortened in context to list)
1. An {email} address that is an alias (or {macro}, though that word is
never used in this connection) for many other email addresses. Some mailing
lists are simple reflectors, redirecting mail sent to them to the list of
recipients. Others are filtered by humans or programs of varying degrees of
sophistication; lists filtered by humans are said to be moderated.
2. The people who receive your email when you send it to such an address.
Mailing lists are one of the primary forms of hacker interaction, along
with {Usenet}. They predate Usenet, having originated with the first UUCP
and ARPANET connections. They are often used for private
information-sharing on topics that would be too specialized for or
inappropriate to public Usenet groups. Though some of these maintain almost
purely technical content (such as the Internet Engineering Task Force
mailing list), others (like the ?sf-lovers? list maintained for many years
by Saul Jaffe) are recreational, and many are purely social. Perhaps the
most infamous of the social lists was the eccentric bandykin distribution;
its latter-day progeny, lectroids and tanstaafl, still include a number of
the oddest and most interesting people in hackerdom.
Mailing lists are easy to create and (unlike Usenet) don't tie up a
significant amount of machine resources (until they get very large, at
which point they can become interesting torture tests for mail software).
Thus, they are often created temporarily by working groups, the members of
which can then collaborate on a project without ever needing to meet
face-to-face. Much of the material in this lexicon was criticized and
polished on just such a mailing list (called ?jargon-friends?), which
included all the co-authors of Steele-1983.
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