LISTSERV 17.0 Help

Use this pulldown menu to select the list to which you want to subscribe or unsubscribe.

Use this text box to enter or change the name for your subscription. Subscriptions require both a first and a last name. Alternatively, if you want to subscribe anonymously, enter Anonymous.

Use this text box to enter or change the email address for your subscription.

Regular

With a regular subscription, you receive individual postings immediately as they are processed by LISTSERV.

Digest (Traditional), Digest (MIME Format), Digest (HTML Format)

With a digest subscription, you receive larger messages (called digests) at regular intervals, usually once per day or once per week. These digests are collections of individual list postings. Some lists are so active that they produce several digests per day.

Digests are a good compromise between reading everything as it is posted and feeling like the list is clogging your mailbox with a large number of individual postings.

There are three digest formats: a traditional text-only format; a MIME format, which (with mail clients that understand MIME digests) "bursts" the individual messages out of the digest so that you can read them separately; and an HTML format.

Index (Traditional), Index (HTML Format)

With an index subscription, you receive short index messages at regular intervals, usually once per day or once per week. These indexes show you what is being discussed on the list, without including the text of the individual postings. For each posting, the date, the author's name and email address, the subject of the message, and the number of lines is listed. You can then download messages of interest from the server (the index contains instructions on how to do that).

An index subscription is ideal if you only want to read a few hand-picked messages.

You can choose to have the index sent to you in either a traditional format (plain text) or in HTML format with embedded links.

Normal LISTSERV-Style Header

Full mail headers (normally the default), containing Internet routing information, MIME headers, and so forth. The "To" header contains the address of the list.

LISTSERV-Style, with List Name in Subject

Full mail headers (like the default) except that a "subject tag" is added to the subject line of mail coming from the list. If there is no subject tag defined in the list's configuration, the name of the list will be used. This can be very useful for sorting and filtering mail.

No Acknowledgements

LISTSERV will not send any acknowledgement at all when you post to the list. This is probably not a good setting unless you really do not want any feedback from LISTSERV whether or not your posting was received and distributed.

Short Message Confirming Receipt

Typically, this is the default setting, although it can be overridden by the list owner. If you choose this setting, LISTSERV will send you a short message whenever you post to the list, confirming the distribution of your message and telling you to how many people it was sent.

Receive Copy of Own Postings

Some people prefer this setting over the short acknowledgement message. It tells LISTSERV to send you a copy of your own postings so that you can see exactly how it appeared on the list.

Mail Delivery Disabled Temporarily

This option toggles the receipt of mail from the list. You may want to disable mail delivery if you will be away from your email for an extended period of time.

Address Concealed from REVIEW Listing

This option conceals you from the list of subscribers shown by the REVIEW command. Note that the list owner and the LISTSERV administrator can always get the complete list of subscribers, regardless of this setting. Nowadays, most lists are configured so that only the list owner can use the REVIEW command, but some lists still allow subscribers to get a listing of all the other participants.

For lists with topics enabled (if the topics section is not visible, topics are not enabled), this section allows you to subscribe or unsubscribe to all, some or none of the available topics.