MAILING LISTS -- HISTORY

In the early 1990's, NCVA member Rob Rude and others believed the NCVA needed a capability to communicate with the membership in a timely manner (more so than the quarterly "Cryptolog" newspaper). Rob started an email list using a program called "MAJORDOMO" which provided a basic capability to "reflect" email from a single user to a list of many users (much like the Navy's AIG ‑ Address Indicator Group ‑ used in record communications). Rob was also providing "Webmaster" capability by setting up and maintaining a web‑page front for the NCVA.

As these capabilities were advertised ‑ both in the Cryptolog and by word of mouth ‑ member interest and participation grew rapidly and soon began to overwhelm Rob's ability to administer both operations because he was still on active duty and preparing to transition to the civilian contractor world.

At the time, most members had dial‑up (e.g., "slow") internet capabilities. MAJORDOMO was a public domain (i.e., "free") program but offered relatively little flexibility in streamlining administrative functions. Then, when the Internet Service Provider (ISP) at the time was sold, the ability to provide this service to NCVA members was compromised.

About that time, Bill Hickey was providing volunteer "listmaster" functions for the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado using a more sophisticated email list server program called LISTPROC. Getting together, Bill and Rob decided to try to migrate the email list from MAJORDOMO to LISTPROC since Bill had the ability to provide the hosting service on the BVSD system for free. Fairly soon after that, because of free‑time constraints, Rob and Bill decided to split the duties of listmaster and webmaster ‑ Bill took over the duties of "listmaster" thereby freeing up Rob's time to devote to improving the NCVA's web page presence.

For years, BVSD had used a parent volunteer (Bill) to administer their hundreds of email lists and a teacher volunteer (spare time) to maintain their own web presence. A decision was made to hire a full‑ time webmaster and eventually the district decided to abandon the LISTPROC program as an email server because the developer (CREN) had decided to terminate support for the program. Because BVSD's capability was hosted by the University of Colorado (Boulder), Bill was able to migrate the NCVA email reflectors from the BVSD servers to CU's system because the capabilities were "grandfathered".

CU's LISTPROC servers provide email services to thousands of university email lists, some of which have thousands of subscribers. So, NCVA is a very small part of the CU community of email lists ‑ thus, Bill's ability to make enhancements and changes to the LISTPROC operation (as he was able to do with BVSD) went away. LISTPROC, despite no longer being supported by the originating developer, is still a functional system ‑ albeit restricted in its ability to adapt to new developments on the internet.

As well, in the present economic environment, CU has undergone a number of staffing reductions and periodically examines all their computer operations to see where financial savings can be made. While we've not been asked to leave the CU environment yet, it is probably only a matter of time before the administrative staff itself decides to abandon LISTPROC and in the process streamline the number of email lists they have to support. When those decisions are made, "personal" lists (such as NCVA and FRUPAC) will most likely be asked to leave and support will be provided only to those lists that directly impact the university's mission and student/faculty populations.

Last Modified: Tuesday, 09-Jun-2009 18:52:18 EDT