When Carnegie Mellon learned that a handful of Usenet groups were dedicated to sharing adult content, university staff blocked campus computers from visiting them. Soon after a student created the Fighting Censorship mailing list. It was an email group whereby any subscriber could send to all the other members by putting a single address in the `To:` field. On most days, there were 100+ messages going to everyone on the list.
"That was too much for most people," recalled Declan McCullagh, the student who created the list. “So…I started an announcement version of the list.” Like so many lists before his, what started as a discussion group turned into a newsletter. Elsewhere and around the same time, what started as software to manage discussion groups turned into software to manage newsletters.
Mailing lists didn’t die in the 90s, though. They are loved and kept alive by enthusiasts and specialists in much the same way as vinyl records or pagers or fixed gear bikes or 35mm cameras, old but not antiquated, anachronisms with modern advantages. They’re just more hidden today, their presence in your inbox as indicative of how long you’ve been online as anything.
The birth of group email
To understand why mailing lists started out as more popular than newsletters, it helps to differentiate the two. “The way most people keep up to date on network news is through subscription to a number of mail reflectors (also known as mail exploders),” according to Ed Krol’s 1989 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet (or, RFC 1118). You’d subscribe to a reflector and could then send to everyone on the list by sending to the reflector’s address, or replying to an email someone else sent to the entire group.
“Each subscriber sees all the mail forwarded by the reflector, and if one wants to put his ‘two cents’ in sends a message with the comments to the reflector,” is how The Hitchhiker’s Guide put it. These were the precursors to Slack or Twitter threads, predecessors of Facebook Groups and Discord servers where anyone can send to everyone. Except that reflectors were, and in some corners of the internet still are, group discussions without walled gardens and gatekeepers.
In fact, creating a list for people to coordinate and collaborate was one of the earliest evolutionary jumps in email. Steve Walker proposed the MsgGroup list in 1975 as “a FORUM-type set up if it's not too difficult to set up, realizing that many (myself included) will have little time to contribute.” When a participant sent something to the group it would first go to Dave Farber (later Einar Stefferaud), who would forward messages by hand, one by one, to the list’s individual subscribers.
A few years into MsgGroup’s tenure, an argument broke out as Stefferaud was on his way to a conference. “I forwarded the address list to the subscribers and said, 'You are on your own. I gotta go travel!’” One of the subscribers had written a program to auto-forward messages by the end of the day. The year that followed was when non-academic reflectors and hobby newsletters took flight.
Growing pains
Tom Parmenter started his “one-way” list, Desperado, in 1978, with an inaugural issue on vegetarian dog food. But although it would peak with a very respectable 3,200 subscribers a few years later, Desperado got lost in the deluge of posts from reflectors like SF-lovers, which started around the same time. Either way, reflector or newsletter, adding or removing someone from a subscriber list was still done by hand.
Moderators were buried in messages like David Rossien’s plea to SF-lovers, “Please add me to the list. Bill Westfield brought the list to my attention. I am an sf fan of about 14 years…” Each of these petitions required a list manager to add or remove the address from an `/etc/aliases` file. For uber popular lists like SF-lovers, keeping up appearances was a lot of work. “The email traffic became too large,” recalled SF-lovers moderator Saul Jaffe, “around the time of the Empire Strikes Back.”
At this point, email was still largely based on timesharing systems and mostly at universities. Students and faculty would all log into the same single machine to check their inboxes and, when several of them received emails from the same reflector, their server would receive an avalanche of emails, all at once. That’s part of what prompted a bunch of system administrators to switch to news servers like Usenet.
“I will shortly change the human-nets and sf-lovers mailing lists on CSVAX to ONLY feed into netnews. This way only one copy has to be stored on CSVAX,” Mark Horton informed UC Berkeley users in 1981. “This is especially critical right now because all of the printers
on CSVAX are down, and people are jamming the 1200 baud network link.” And so Usenet and Bulletin Board Systems curbed the growth of reflectors for a few years. It might have been the end of them, constant explosions of discourse proving too noisy and hard to manage to be worth the effort. But a French university student just outside of Paris couldn’t bear to see them die.
Computerized signups
“There were mailing lists about all sorts of technical topics,” was the reason Eric Thomas loved reflectors so much. “When you had a problem with your system, you could ask the list for help and get useful advice in a matter of hours.” He was not immune to their many shortcomings, though.
Every email sent from North America to Europe, including duplicates, “had to travel over the saturated transatlantic lines (two 9600bps analog lines, of which at least one always turned out to be down at any given time)...traffic from the mailing lists alone was threatening to make private email totally unusable, with delivery delays approaching a week.”
Thomas was receiving week-old reflections, sometimes from lists he had asked to be removed from weeks earlier. “INFO@BITNIC was now manned full-time by someone who did nothing but add and remove people from lists all day long, and that they were still unable to meet demand.” So, he released “Revised Listserv”, an improvement on BITNET’s existing and distinct listserv program, with the revised version written in completely original code and having no association to the original program.
That first version of the software did two things. It sent a single copy of a list’s email across the pond that could then be duplicated and forwarded locally. It also automated subscription requests, more than 10 years after Steve Walker created MsgGroup.
In the years that followed, Thomas would add even more features that would go on to become newsletter staples like searchable archives, hosted media, and double opt-in verifications. In less than two years there were 1,000 reflectors running off what was by then called just listserv. “To subscribe, send mail to listserv@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM with the command (paste it!) in the e-mail message body: SUBSCRIBE MUSEUM-L,” reads the instructions for joining the Smithsonian’s still-active Museum discussion list, which is to this day managed by Thomas’s productized version of listserv, L-Soft.
To make it that far, listserv had to first expand beyond BITNET, which was withering, and onto the then burgeoning internet. “Listserv proved to be the lasting legacy of Bitnet,” according to a professor emeritus from George Washington University. “Users did not need to have any special software, as all communication through listserv was conducted through email…Listserv could host an email-based open forum, host a moderated discussion group, or publish an electronic periodical.” Its utility had not only outgrown its birthplace but also its target users.
Managing your list from a website
Reflectors remained popular throughout the 90s, thanks to programs that made list management less technical. Brent Chapman ported listserv over to Unix in 1992 with Majordomo, which was free and eventually pioneered letting readers subscribe and unsubscribe online. Still, reflectors were on the decline as people transitioned from answering emails to surfing the web.
The Fun_People “broadcast list” has some fantastically detailed stats about its average messages per day and average lines per message, both of which peaked in 1995. Newsletters, both personal and corporate, were taking off. Dave Winer had just started the hugely influential DaveNet and PC World kicked off Windows 95 Tips. "Everybody thought that email was too simple," Declan Fox told Wired. "They wanted everything on the Web with the graphics and the banners.” But their lists were growing twice as fast as their website traffic.
At this point, both software and protocols were evolving much faster than they had in the 80s. MajorCool came out as a “CGI application that provides Majordomo mailing list configuration and subscriber management via WWW,” and the IETF added mailing list commands to email headers. Both of which were in response to email’s uneasy coexistence with the web browser.
Thanks to RFC 2369, mail clients could “provide automated tools for users to perform list functions. This could take the form of a menu item, push button, or other user interface element. The intent is to simplify the user experience, providing a common interface to the often cryptic and varied mailing list manager commands.” Today, that’s most visible in the Unsubscribe button that Gmail and Apple Mail put next to a newsletter’s name, outside the bounds of a newsletter’s content.
In 2001, RFC 2919 expanded mailing list headers to include List-ID to “reliably identify messages that belong to a particular mailing list.” This, only a few months after Yahoo! released its Groups platform, complete with a promise of “One email address & website that allows you to...share photos & files, plan events, send a newsletter, stay in touch with friends and family, discuss sports, health, current events, and more.” This, the very same month that Google Groups launched its searchable archive of posts to Usenet and reflectors (the ability to actually create a group not arriving until 2005).
From that point onwards, reflectors have taken a backseat to newsletters in the cultural zeitgeist, relegated to the domains of developers, researchers, and working groups.
When a newsletter won’t cut it
What started with Dave Farber manually choosing who received MsgGroup emails, and later morphed into an editable `/etc/aliases` file, then a listserv command, followed by a MajorCool webpage, and a detour into Yahoo! Groups, culminated in the `List-Unsubscribe` and `List-ID` headers baked into almost every newsletter platform and mail client available today. There likely wouldn’t be a Buttondown without the reflectors and exploders that kept people’s inboxes alive in the 80s and 90s.
And who knows, maybe they’ll make a comeback. An opinion piece in the New York Times titled The Last Place Left Online for Real Conversation opined about how messaging apps are “a much-needed refuge from social media…in the apocalyptic landscape of our algorithmically juiced culture wars, a group chat is a refuge where my ideas and thoughts don’t have to be fully formed.” There isn’t one mention of email, but the original networked communication, reflectors and all, is perhaps the best expression of that idea.
Newsletters are one of the best ways to promote or sell your work. They are one of the best ways to build direct relationships with subscribers. Group discussions, though? Maybe those still make sense as a reflector, a single email address for friends, family, and pen pals to support, encourage, and entertain each other inside the inbox you already have and the email address you’ve owned for years.
“The fact that dissimilar topics have been discussed in our own instance of a human network says a lot about its nature and the interests and nature of its members and should not be considered as detracting from the quality of the discussion,” Jorge Phillips posted to the human-nets reflector in 1981. “A human network is a springboard for human interaction.”