Mailing list accounts at bi.org run on the Majordomo list manager software. This will allow your group or organisation to have a list dedicated to discussing certain issues or issues in a particular organisation or location (eg, bisexuality in Cambridge). A list can have five or five thousand people on it. Open access, closed access and submission-moderated groups are available:

• Open access means that anyone can subscribe (add their email address to the list) or unsubscribe (leave the list) themselves, without any human intervention. The mailing list owner will be notified by email of all subscribe/unsubscribe actions as they occur.
• Closed access means that any attempt to subscribe to the list is forwarded onto the mailing list owner (a human) for approval (the human could enter into discussion with the person who wants to subscribe. eg, to check they aren't commercial, or male if the list is women-only space, etc). The list owner sends an approval message (with a password) to the Majordomo software if they want to let that person join the list.
• Submission-moderated means that any message posted to the list is first sent to a moderator (a human) to check that it is suitable for the list. If the moderator thinks the message is suitable, they forward it onto the Majordomo software with a password. Very few mailing lists work this way because of the work load placed on the moderator.

Mailing list maintainers may also like to have a 'mailing list home page' set up as well which can provide an easy to use WWW interface to the list, as well as containing FAQs and other material relating to the list. See euro-bi's home page for an example.

One concern expressed is that of privacy - some mailing list systems will provide a list of people subscribed to anyone in the world, automatically!! No lists on bi.org will do this - the list of subscribers is safe and only the list owner will have access to it.

Another problem that some lists suffer from is 'spamming' (especially from commercial organisations). None of our lists will let messages onto the list unless they have been sent from a subscriber of that list.

Details we need

1. The list name. eg, something@bi.org. Note that email addresses are case-insensitive (so you can have Mailing-List@bi.org, and it is the same as mailing-list@bi.org), and can't have comma or space characters. There is a convention that lists are often area-type, so for example: uk-bi is UK Bisexuals, euro-bi is European Bisexuals, etc, although is only a convention, and you may not want to use it for your list.
2. A one line description of the list. eg, "Discussions on bisexuality in the UK & Europe"
3. A paragraph or two describing the list (see euro-bi for an example).
4. Any Subject: line prefix for all messages on the list? eg, "CamBi - ". Some lists are setup so that the prefix is automatically added to the Subject: line of all messages that go out on the list. It can make it easy for users on the list to easily see which messages in their mailbox are from the list.
5. Do you want 'reply' to go to the sender of the message, or to the whole list? Normally replies are set to go to the whole list, but novice users can get confused, thinking they are sending a personal reply to the sender.
6. What sort of list do you want - open to subscription by everyone, or subscribe only by approval, and/or moderated submissions? (see above for details).
7. Email us the initial list of people to join up (just their email addresses, we don't need names)

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