Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
easiest, and arguably most popular, method is to host a listserver. Your enter-
prisemayhavesomelistserversoftwareinstalledonthemailserver.Ifyouwill
be installing and managing your own listserver,
Mailman
is open source and
free, and is easy to set up. Listservers can be moderated, enabling a researcher
to closely manage membership and participation such as in a focus group, or
unmoderated, where a researcher may want to lurk to see who joins and par-
ticipates, or to participate in a topical discussion. An unmoderated list that is
closed enables participants to join on their own, but requires the list owner to
approve all subscriptions to the list.
Many listservers can be managed by sending specially crafted emails to an
administrativeaddressontheserver.Userscanrequesttobeaddedtoanexisting
list by sending a message to the listserver. Often this message takes the form of
'SUBSCRIBE listname your name' as in Majordomo or Listserver. The list-
server will then usually reply with a message requesting the recipient to con-
firm their subscription. This is done to foil (to some extent) spam email
address harvesters. Mailman is managed entirely through a web site and
Listserver also has a web management interface available. Potential recipients
can request to be added by visiting the web site. The management interface is
veryintuitive.Eachproductwillhavecommandsforthelistownertoaddusers
explicitly (instead of letting them add themselves), or change the moderation
level or other policies. The exact format will depend on the product.
Documentation can be found at the product web site.
Mail stores
In some types of analysis, the researcher will want to scan large numbers of
messages. Doing this through the mail client interface will usually be very
inconvenient. It may be better to scan the mail storage files directly. Mail
servers store mail messages in a variety of formats. Some are text files while
others are in a proprietary database format. Mail boxes on servers are gen-
erallynotdirectlyavailabletousers;thesystemadministratorwouldneedto
give explicit permission to access it. However, for your own mail account,
mail clients who connect to a server with the POP or IMAP generally save a
copy of each message on the client machine. They also usually offer an
option of creating a local mail box so you can use that function to separate
out mail messages. If you want to convert the mail box into a text file for
analysis, the method depends on the mail client. Unix/Linux clients often
store local mail boxes in “mbox” format. The format is basically the raw
message format with two additional lines of text. Each message starts with a
“From” line (note that there is no“:”) and is followed by the raw mail con-
tents, which are then followed by a blank line. The next message follows the
blank line and is marked by the next “From” line.
