It's almost impossible to estimate how broad the email list community runs. Experts say there are certainly millions, perhaps tens of million of lists. They cover every conceivable topic, from the most arcane scientific topics to the most basely sexual. Some have only a few subscribers, while others have as many as tens of thousands.
The growing problems are familiar to anyone with an email box. The primary culprits are the avalanches of spam cluttering mailboxes with Viagra advertisements and XXX photos. The energy required to clear through that digital underbrush alone has taxed many people's patience for email discussions, experts say.
But the response to the spam assault also has helped undermine mail lists. Many people move email addresses routinely, creating dead boxes that bounce messages back to list administrators. Many people use Web-based mailboxes for email list subscriptions, and these can quickly fill up with spam or even legitimate messages, again bouncing messages back to their original servers, filling administrator mailboxes and requiring substantial time to review and clear.
On the flip side are spam filters such as the popular SpamAssassin, used by many corporations. These routinely catch messages sent simultaneously to a large number of people, mistaking list messages for bulk advertisements. Subscribers have little or no way to tell that their mail is not getting through, or that, in some cases, they have been unsubscribed completely from a list.
Faced with these growing issues, many email groups are changing their format to Web-based bulletin boards or augmenting their discussions with RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, which is a popular content-distribution format used by bloggers and news sites. Internet pundit Clay Shirky, who teaches a graduate course in networking at New York University, said he's close to pulling the plug on his mailing list altogether in favour of RSS.
"The viability of mail lists is rapidly declining," Shirky said. "Fewer people are reading in email directly. It's getting clear that the ordinary Web plus RSS feeds are better."
