Mailring

[Michael Quinion]

> 'e-mail group', serviced by a 'list server', also known as a
> 'listserv'.

Those wonderful people at LSOFT will say very firmly that 'LISTSERV'
(always written in capital letters, for good historical reasons) is a
registered trademark, while 'list server' is the generic term. The
truncated name came about, incidentally, because the program was
first written in the mid-1980s for a computer system that only
allowed eight-character filenames (in upper case).


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>