AFOM is a mailing list that is shared by a number of my friends and myself. A mailing list is, usually, a single email address that all members of the list can send email to. The server at the address will then distribute the email, sending one copy of the message to every member on the list.
AFOM was started toward the end of my freshman year in the spring of 1996. The first archived message on the mailing list is one sent out by myself. In this message I proposed a name for the mailing list, "alt.friends.of.matt", a play on the Usenet newsgroup naming convention. The name ended up sticking, although it is usually shortened to AFOM for convenience.
Originally, AFOM was a carbon copy list of email addresses. To send mail to the list, one simply replied to everyone from a previous message, or one maintained a personal listing of everyone presently on AFOM. This was, of course, very ad hoc, and had it persisted would undoubtedly led to problems maintaining the list. In the fall of 1996, Daniel Rinehart a member of the list volunteered to set up AFOM on a Majordomo server, and AFOM has resided on that server since then. That simplified the mailing process. Each member only needs to send mail to one email address, and the mail gets distributed appropriately to the rest of the list.
The membership on AFOM has been between 10 and 20 people since it's start. Dan, in addition to administrating the list, also archives all the activity on AFOM. Every year in September he rolls over the archive and posts a message listing some statistics about the list. According to his last posting, approximately 12,000 messages have been archived, totaling approximately 25 MB of text.
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This page was created by Mathew Corthell for the course Computers and Society in the fall of 1999 at Northeastern University.