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What is a Mailing List?
Everyone has a need or desire to communicate ideas or news about topics of common interest. Friends and families want to stay in touch, hobbyist like to help each other, cooks like to trade recipes, teachers need to communicate with their students, fan clubs exist to share news and keep current, people with problems seek others with the same challenges... the list is endless. And it seems like there is list for every area of interest - all you have to do is find it. :)
Mailing lists are communities of people formed around a topic of common interest, and have been around since the beginning of the Internet. A mailing list allows people to send email to each other easily. Instead of sending email to everyone on the list, subscribers of a mailing list can send their email to one address, which will then automatically send the message to everyone else. With our mailing list, that address is xs11@egroups.com. You must, subscribe to the list before you send mail to the list.
With mailing lists, you have three subscription options. You can subscribe to the normal version of the list, which means that every email that is sent to the list is sent immediately to you. You can also subscribe to the digest version of the list, which means that you will get one email each night that contains all the email sent to the list during the day. The digest mode is especially useful for people with finicky ISPs such as AOL. Finally, you can subscribe in no mail/online only mode.
One really great new feature (thanks to eGroups) is that list messages will now be archived [as of May 21, 1999]
About our list
For the last several years, the XS11 list has been run on visi.com by Greg Freeman. We appreciate the work that Greg put into setting up the formal list and taking care of the day-to-day administration that is part of any mailing list. However, there is now a free resource on the Internet called "eGroups.com" that will manage our list, and do all the "behind the scenes" administration details for us.
The XS11 list has historically been one of the best self-moderated motorcycle lists on the web. For the most part, we haven't had the kinds of problems (or at least not as severe) as I've seen on several other lists. It's true that we have, from time to time, had minor problems with things off-topic postings, spam, cross posting to other lists, personal attacks and other irritations. While we haven't been as bad as some lists, we also haven't been as good as we could have been.
As will be more thoroughly discussed in the "guidelines" and "Mailing List policies" pages, it is important to keep the list contents to XS/XJ relevant topics. Bandwidth abuse has caused many of our members to drop their subscription to the list. This is very unfortunate because many of the members of our list have technical expertise or are interested in meeting nearby XS-11 riders. Additionally, one of the factors which caused us to lose our previous listserve was the excessive bandwidth on the list, particularly off-topic bandwidth. It is my hope that we get better with each day and each new member.
Here's how to subscribe.
