Published in the Dallas/Fort Worth Unix Users Group Newsletter, November 1998.
Managing Mailing Lists is very typical of the type of book that O'Reilly publishes, and it also has the same high quality that I've come to expect from O'Reilly. A mailing list, in the context of the Internet, is a mechanism for a group of like-minded people to share information on a particular topic via email. This book is written for those people who set up mailing list servers, create new mailing lists, and manage mailing lists. A person who has participated in mailing lists and wants to be able to use them more effectively or wants to know more about their inner workings may also want to peruse the book.
The book starts out with a nice introduction to mailing lists, and a thorough look at many of the issues involved when designing a mailing list. It doesn't cover every minute technical consideration, and it doesn't cover all the psychological factors of mailing lists that I'd like to explore further (like how the number of participants affects the list). But it's quite adequate as a foundation for the typical mailing list maintainer. This section includes a few gems borrowed from the archives of the list-manager mailing list, and pointers to valuable on-line resources.
Managing Mailing Lists focuses on four particular mailing list management systems: Listproc, Majordomo, SmartList, and LISTSERV Lite. Mailing list management programs are given the unfortunate acronym MLM - so don't think that we're talking about spam software that supports Multi-Level Marketing; that's a very different beast. The author's criteria for choosing these MLMs was that they run on Unix, which is the most stable system for mail delivery, and that they be available for free. (See O'Reilly's influence? :-) There's also a chapter on using Unix's sendmail mail transport system directly to manage small mailing lists.
Besides the introductory chapters and one on troubleshooting, the book has three sections that cover different aspects of the MLMs - maintaining lists, administering the MLM, and a set of appendices with reference information. I think the information would be better organized if the administration and reference information were combined. In any case, the book gives valuable information about the five MLMs (counting sendmail). As a maintainer for several majordomo mailing lists, I have been very frustrated by the inadequate documentation that comes with the software. This book does a good job of filling in the gaps. It even points out flaws in the documentation and bugs in the software that we need to be aware of. After reading the book, I have been able to enable a feature of majordomo that I wasn't even sure was supported. The author doesn't give a broad survey of the many available MLMs, but instead goes into great detail about the five specific MLMs. The book will be useful for the users of any MLM software, but most useful to those who are interested in the software that is covered. It is valuable to see how other mailing lists work. I have many ideas now how to improve my majordomo setup, now that I know how a few other MLMs work. And I feel more comfortable in using the mailing lists that I participate in.
I did find some minor technical flaws, and some points mentioned in passing that needed a little more explanation. My guess is that in order to be thorough, the author did some research to stretch his knowledge a little, and in a few places he stretches too far. Nonetheless, the quality of the book is well above average for its genre. I have been told that some of the flaws are fixed in later printings of the book. One more complaint - there are several plugs for other related books, all published by O'Reilly. This lack of diversity adds an air of commercialism to the book. The author assures me, however, that he feels that O'Reilly carries the best books on these topics, and that the choice in references was his alone.
I would recommend the book for beginning mailing list maintainers, experienced mailing list maintainers who want to understand their software better, and seasoned mailing list users who want to see what's under the hood. The book will be confusing to an email novice, and is probably not sufficient to get a novice email user up to speed unless they only deal with a mailing list, and leave the maintenance of the software to an expert. Overall, a solid technical book.
Managing Mailing Lists, by Alan Schwartz, first printing. Published by O'Reilly & Associates, 1998. ISBN: 1-56592-259-X.