Sourcing With Mailing Lists

Introduction
The next time you are trying to track down a candidate, try using email. The Internet is home to about 90,000 mailing lists on a huge range of subjects. Each list has between 10 and 10,000 subscribers. (Liszt is a searchable index of over 60,000 of them and includes a great introduction to mailing lists).

Mailing lists vary significantly in frequency, content, tone and local culture. Essentially, they are all groups (communities) that communicate by sending email through the mailing list software. You send a piece of mail to the mail software and it distributes it to the rest of the group.

Essentially, there are three different types of mailing list (majordomo, listproc or listserv). The names refer to the software that operates the list. That's important because your ability to research the membership of a list depends on using the right instructions. Each piece of mailing list software has a different set of instructions. The most common type of mailing list is the "listserve" variety.

You can review many listserve groups by email. Send an email to this address:

listserv@listserv.net

Leave the subject line of the message blank.

At the top of the message body, write:

list global xyz

where xyz equals the term you are searching for. For example, sending the command

list global unix

will return a list of all known listservs relating to unix, including any and all lists that contain the string "unix".

It's important to know that every mailing list has two addresses One looks like this:

• listserv@domainname
• majordomo@domainname
• listproc@domainname

And is the address for the computer that administers the list. It is useful for finding out more about the list and, importantly, getting to know who subscribes to the list.

The other address looks like:

• net-lawyers@domainname
• adv-html@domainname
• ada-l@domainname

When you send mail to this address, it reaches all of the list subscribers.

No matter which type of list you are working with, you can always put one of two basic commands in the message of your email

• help
• info

Info will give you a description of the group and its contents. Help will list the various commands that you can use. With a bit of proficiency, and some attention to the dynamics of the mailing list, you can find the sorts of subject oriented passive candidates that make for effective recruiting.