Email listing has become a popular means to send information to a large number of people who are the subscribers interested in knowing more about a certain topic or discussing about the relevant issues. There are two types of email lists namely the announcement list and the discussion list. Various companies make use of premium email services with huge number of email accounts and custom configurations. They also manage the domain name of the user that includes any schemes for email authentication. The services providers use an array of technologies and offerings according to the needs of the users.

Usually they offer a basic standard e-mail which is POP3 based and a web mail based on the applications of open source. Web hosting is not offered by all e-mail hosting providers. A free e-mail list is therefore made to make the distribution easy to a large number of internet users. This can be either fully or partially automated and is made by the use of mailing list software. It has a reflector address which is capable of receiving mails through the server.

The reflector receives the messages and it is then processed by the software. After being acted upon according to the content of the massages they are distributed among various subscribers who opt in list. There is a facility of sending commands to the list servers to perform certain tasks such as, unsubscribing, subscribing, temporarily stopping the message sending and even modifying the preferences. The messages can be forwarded to the subscribers in two ways. They can either receive it individually as received by the server or they can be sent in a form of a bunch containing the messages received by the server on one particular day.

List –building allows the subscribers to select the mode they want to have their messages in. There are however many types of emailing list options such as newsletters and discussion lists. Various sectors employ newsletter and other promotional emailing list as a direct marketing tool. The discussion list allows the subscribers to use the emailing list and send messages to other subscribers having similar answering fashion. This makes actual discussion and exchange of information possible.

The discussion list has topic oriented messages and can even have general discussion topics that may interest the receiver. Both the type of mailing lists has to be very careful regarding the spamming. An approval of a moderator is required in the discussion list before it is sent to the other subscribers. The newsletter set by companies also work in communication with whitelist distributors. These distributors check the standard of the mailing messages and impose a fine in the event of any complain by the subscribers.