Fran has always had a lifelong fascination with pygmy hippos. she could talk about them for days. Unfortunately, she has a very difficult time finding people who will listen to her that long. She was beginning to feel she was the only pygmy hippo fan in the world. Fran took a class that introduced her to the Internet and mailing lists. She knew this would be her chance to find other hippophiles (yep, my spell-checker blew a gasket on that one! I hit the ignore button.). She found a mailing list called hippos by searching around the world wide web for mailing lists indexes. The instructions told her the hippo mailing list had two different addresses. The first one was majordomo@nml.zoo.org She knew by the majordomo part that this address was the majordomo / listserv program, and that she would have to send a message to it so she could be part of the list. By following the instructions she found on the index page, she knew she had to start up her email program. She did so, and composed a message to majordomo@nml.zoo.org Her message contained only one line, which again she got from the instructions. It was: subscribe hippos She sent the message, and in a few minutes she got back a response! It welcomed her to the mailing list, and told her she would start getting mails soon from other members of the list. It also told her how to sign off of the list if she found it was not to her liking. She carefully saved this message, in case she ever needed it later.
Fran waited for a couple of days, and got some wonderful email about pygmy hippos. After watching for a few days, she wanted to send a message to the group introducing herself and asking questions about one particular family of hippos she knew about.
To send the mail, she went to her email program, and composed a message to the list itself. She knew the address, because it had been in the instructions she saw on the web, and it was also in the first message she got from the group. She addressed her message to hippo@nml.zoo.org. She sent the message, and in a few days, got a number of greetings and responses from fellow hippo lovers. Fran found newfound happiness and a group of fellow hippophiles (had to use that word again!) all over the world.