SimpList - A simple Internet e-mail mailing list processor
Copyright (C) 1996  Chris Ingram
See docs/COPYING file for licence and warranty information


Who am I?

   I am Chris Ingram, a Computer Science major at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
   I do software development for Georgia Tech Research Institute specializing
   in database intensive tools.  I have also worked with other companies doing
   WWW / database software development.  I can be reached at

      Chris.Ingram@acm.org (permanent e-mail address)
      Chris.Ingram@gtri.gatech.edu
      http://aistweb.gtri.gatech.edu/~ci6/


Why did I create this mailing list software?

   Someone in the college group at my church thought it would be a good
   idea to start a mailing list to keep students informed about upcoming
   activities and such.  Many college students have access to Internet
   e-mail through their universities, and thus it is an effective form
   of communication.  Many students in the group go to school "away" only
   coming back on occasional weekends and perhaps during the summer.
   What better way to keep in touch with this seemingly volatile group
   than cheap Internet e-mail?

   This same person started collecting e-mail addresses every Sunday,
   and started e-mailing from an AOL account he had set up.  Only one
   announcement went out before his account was closed.  (He got tired
   of paying for it, I guess.)

   A few months later, one of my friends was home from the University
   of Georgia for the weekend.  We were going to an Atlanta Braves Baseball
   game Sunday after church.  Unfortunately, my friend did not find out
   about the game until Sunday morning, and it was too late for him to
   go due to other plans.  That was when I decided that a mailing list
   definately needed to be created for the group.

   I decided a mailing list would be better than just sending out a mass
   e-mail every once in a while for several reasons.  First of all, anyone
   can post items of an announcement type nature to the list.  I decided
   it should be a moderated list to keep discussion off the list.  Also,
   being a list program, anyone could unsubscribe themselves if they were
   so inclined.

   Being a Computer Science major, at a high-tech school, I figured I
   could probably find resources through my work, major school, or
   university (each of which have mailing list servers running) to set
   up an extremely small moderated mailing list.  Unfortunately, after
   contacting the appropriate persons at each place, my request was
   turned down almost every time.  What a bummer.  However, being the
   resourceful CS major that I am, I decided that I would find some
   mailing list software that could be run out of the account where I
   received mail without having to have root or otherwise special
   priviledges.  I searched high and low on the Internet and World Wide
   Web for such a simple piece of software to no avail.  The closest
   thing I found was called SmartList written by the same great guy
   that writes the procmail mail filtering package.  It was slightly
   too complicated and didn't adequately meet my needs although it does
   handle some details like file locking and has more features.

   When I had just about given up, I thought, "why not write my own?"
   Then this mailing list program was born.  I wrote the majority of
   the program in AWK, because AWK seemed like an appropriate tool for
   the job.  After about a week (maybe 20 to 25 hours), it was functional.


What is the purpose of this mailing list software?

   This mailing list program was written to allow a person to create a
   small mailing list that can be run from his own Unix account without
   having to have root or otherwise special priviledges.  Users can
   subscribe themselves to and unsubscribe themselves from a list.  The
   owner can make the list moderated or not.  There are not a whole lot
   of options of things that can be done, but all the basic
   functionality of a mailing list is there and it works pretty well.


What are the potential risks involved in using this mailing list software?

   Remember that I wrote this mailing list software to run a small moderated
   mailing list.  There are probably issues which it does not handle like
   locking files that are being written to, etc.  Hopefully, this will not
   be significant.  AWK is supposedly a little slower than PERL (a similar
   interpreted language), but majordomo (a popular free mailing list server)
   is written in PERL, and is in wide use on the Internet.  Both are slower
   than a compiled language such as C, but there are too many details to
   worry about when writing such a program in C.  Remember, this was a small
   project intended to create something that meets my needs, and it does.