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This page is intended for users interested in using lists.psu.edu to set up their own LISTSERV mailing lists. If you're just interested in instructions for subscribing and unsubscribing to a LISTSERV mailing list, you probably want to read the subscribers page instead.
If you haven't already done so, take a minute to read the subscribers and owners pages on this site. This page assumes that you are already familiar with their concepts.
Frequently, groups want to maintain their own announcement or discussion mailing lists. For simple, temporary ones, the system administrators will usually set up a mail alias that points to a plain text file that contains the email addresses of the people on the mailing list. The method has the advantages that its operation is easy to understand, it can be quickly set up on a local mail server, and that changes merely require editing the text file. The disadvantages are that the list maintainer has to manually edit the file to add or remove subscribers, and anyone who knows the mail alias can send messages to the list.
For large and/or long-term mailing lists, a better solution is often to use a LISTSERV mailing list server to maintain the list. This system is extremely powerful, subscriptions can be automated, and access to the list can be controlled. Searchable archives of the list can be kept automatically, and you can designate roles such as "owner", "moderator", and "editor" to individuals to delegate control of the content and distribution of your list to more than one person.
Penn State maintains a LISTSERV server for its faculty, staff, and students, called lists.psu.edu. It looks like you can request a new mailing list for practically any university-related purpose.
If you go to Setting Up The Owners
After your list gets created, your owners will need to log in. From the main page, you'll see a link to the management interface. If any of your owners haven't owned a list before, they'll need to set their password. Follow the link from the login page to do so. They'll need to confirm their new password via email. Make sure each owner does this.
There really isn't a web interface for this portion, which is unfortunate, since this is the part of LISTSERV that could use it the most.
Instead, when you go to adjust the configuration for a list, you're simply presented with the list headers (the configuration file, basically), and it's up to you to edit it correctly and submit it. For this, you're almost certainly going to want the owner's manual, which is quite large and terse. The most relevant section will be appendix A, which describes all of the keywords that you see in the header.
Here are some of the keywords that you may want to adjust. Check their entry in the manual for detailed information, I won't duplicate it here. Be careful doing this, I don't think that there's much (if any) error checking for the changes that you make. Hopefully you only need to do this very infrequently.
This option specifies whether the owners receive email every time someone subscribes or unsubscribes from the list.
This controls who is allowed to send email to the list.
By default, this value is set to "Local", which means that only email addresses that end in ".psu.edu" are allowed to subscribe to the list. Many lists don't want to have this restriction, so you can adjust it here. If you want any email address to be able to subscribe, change this value to "*".
You can specify this keyword more than once to list all of the people who are owners of the list.
Frequently, list owners have a web site that they want people to be able to subscribe from, often simply by providing their email address and checking a box. To do this, your web script needs to send an email to LISTSERV@lists.psu.edu on behalf of the user. You should forge the "From:" address, since that's what LISTSERV looks at to determine who should get signed up. Here are the headers for the email that you should send. The subject and body can be empty: