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Internet > Mailing
Lists >
Mailing List History
Who invented mailing lists? Early forms of mailing lists were invented almost as soon as email was invented. It quickly became apparent that by combining several email addresses together into a single address, one email could be easily sent to a group of people in one action. The first mailing lists carried on the ARPANET were based on the first email program SNDMSG. Some of the early and most popular mailing lists included the following:
Google Groups has some interesting historical logs of SF-lovers, human-nets, and other ARPANET mailing lists from the early 1980's. In fact, it was these lists that inspired Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott to develop the Usenet to provide similar functionality for organizations that weren't connected to the ARPANET. A version of mailing lists was also created on the BITNET network to enable thousands of researchers in organizations around the world to exchange information. BITNET also copied most of their mailing lists to the Usenet newsgroups. For many years there have been three mailing list software applications that run most mailing lists (see more information at the linked pages):
Historical applications. There have been many other types of mailing list management software developed over the years, including those listed below:
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