Electronic mail is the most familiar way of communicating with others on the Internet. You use a mail program to mail some text (it may also contain graphics/images/sounds) to a username at an address. Mail is faster than the post and cheaper (free at the moment).
Most email in the LMB is sent/recieved on the VMS system (nutmeg etc). However, if you normally work on a Unix machine, then it can be more convenient to access mail via the Biochemistry computer network. This requires that you get an account on the Biochemistry Sun system from John Elder (jke@bioch.ox.ac.uk). Whoever does system administration on the Unix machine must then install a new sendmail.cf file and mount the /var/mail directory from newton. It is also important that your UID/GID tallies with that established for you on newton, but this is simple to arrange.
A mailing list allows you to send mail to more than one person.
A List Server is a way of distributing mail to a group of people interested in a single topic. Rather than use a mailing list yourself, you mail a single message to the list server computer which then redistributes the message to all the addresses in its list. There is a list like this for Alwyn Jones' O program. To join a mailing list you usually have to send a mail message with the text SUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. For example, to subscribe to the o-info mailing list you send the message SUBSCRIBE to o-info-request@kaktus.kemi.aau.dk. Once you are subscribed, you can post messages to the list by mailing your message to o-info@kaktus.kemi.aau.dk, your message will then be sent automatically to all the other people who have subscribed to the list.
There are many other mailing lists maintained for diverse reasons. The syntax is basically the same for all of them. One mistake many people make is to send SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE messages to the list itself, rather than to the -request address. This usually irritates everyone on the list, so be careful!