17
March
2008
glossary-wxyz

  • Work Dream — Coming soon!
  • Yahoogroup — A Yahoogroup is an online forum/mailing list that grew out of the earlier sites of “OneList” and “E-Groups”. E-Groups bought out OneList, and then Yahoo bought out E-groups to create Yahoogroups. It works like this: You sign up and provide a working email address. Then you find groups that sound interesting to you and join them. (There are dozens on occult subjects.) If you sign up to receive posts by mail, then all of the mail sent to a group comes to your email inbox. This is not as bad as most online forums, because you are not subscribing to the entire site, only to a specific group. When you receive a group email, so does everyone else subscribed to that group (barring problems), unless a person has signed up to “No Mail,” electing to read on the web forum. The web forum is simply a message archive, but instead of getting an email immediately as it was sent by the person posting, you read at your leisure and get everything late.

    The advantages to getting it all via mailing list are that you can reply immediately, and that makes it sort of like a group chat. But unlike a group chat, you are not nailed to your chair and can wander off, to reply whenever you get back, and you haven’t missed anything. The replies of anyone who has posted since you left are now in your inbox, and you don’t have to bother with hunting them down on the site and sorting through them. It can be as instant or as leisurely as you choose at any given moment, yet still easily accessible and easy to remember, because it’s all right in your inbox.

    There is also a digest option, in which you receive a long, bulk email once a day (more often in busier groups). The biggest disadvantages to the digest are delayed delivery, and the fact that people often do not trim the previous mail from their replies, so you have to scroll for pages to skip all the filler between bits of fresh material.

    If you get sick of any group, you can simply send an email to unsubscribe-groupname@yahoogroups.com and you’ll be removed. There’s also a link at the bottom of each email, as supplied by Yahoogroups. It’s a nifty, useful system, and it’s free.

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