Email list software

There is not a great deal of variation in the types of lists and list software available at the present time. Most of them allow varying degrees of control over list moderation, open or closed subscription policies, within typical broadcast and group model lists. Still there are countless companies providing these services. I will try to categorise the main ones that I have encountered.

Server based list software
e.g. majordomo, listserv
These programs sit on a server and automatically administer the mailing list. They have been around for a long time and are efficient and familiar to many people on the web. Generally they are accessed via email. To subscribe you send a message with the subject subscribe or signup and your email address.
They offer all the standard list properties of being able to have moderation and subscription policies as well as sometimes offering digest modes where users can receive daily or weekly emails which contain either all the weeks posts or a moderated summary.
Unfortunately these services are relatively expensive.

Web software
e.g. egroups, onelist.
Recently there has been a growth in web accessible free list services. Much like the free email services users can set up accounts and run any number of lists. They often have moderation and subscription options as well as added web features, such as being able to get lists of all the URLs posted to the list.
Unfortunately they will often attach advertising to the base of your mails to pay for the service.

Others
e.g. Cold-fusion/Forums, Caucus
There are many server side software tools that allow you to build web applications that may include email list software.  However this is not necessarily their first purpose.

Variations
www.sixdegrees.com
Six degrees is a website that allows people to enter the email addresses of friends and associates and then chat to those friends AND their friends through chat boards and message boards.
It is possible to see this as a variation of an email list, though in my experience it is not how it gets used.
I have been on it for over a year and only received two or three emails. I sent a mail to my contacts asking why that might be:

 I am curious about why I am getting so little direct email from my first and second degree contacts on 6degrees, is it because you think writing something to your list would be a spam? Or that you have nothing to say to a group of people that comprises of people that you may or may not want to hear certain things...

I actually think it is quite rude that I can't choose to just write to first and second degree personal contacts, because I don't really want to be bothering the professional contacts of my friends.

Is six degrees just something you joined by mistake and now you get a lot of annoying emails that you can't be bothered to try and stop because it involves remembering your password, which might have been 'password' or perhaps it was one of those automatically generated ones like 'footnice'...

Anyway, I want you to know that I won't consider any mail I recieve from you a spam, or if I did I would just block your mails.

How does the reply work on these for those of you who have recieved this by email? Will it reply to all my first and second degreee contacts, or yours or just me or what?

Josh On

I only received one reply via email, which I think was the fault of six degrees.  I discovered two weeks later that I had four replies on my bulletin board on the site. It might be the way I have it set up.