If you're looking for a mailing list about a particular subject, Liszt (http://www.liszt.com) is the best place to start your search. Just enter your keywords in the search box, and you'll be presented with mailing lists whose descriptions include your subject words. Select a list, and Liszt gives you the information it has about the list, including directions about how to subscribe. At that point, Liszt's job ends; yours is just beginning.
I'm a believer in mailing lists. I've joined a few, and haven't been disappointed. List members are generally knowledgeable about their subjects, and the information they post is useful, interesting, and in some cases humorous.
But several frustrating, puzzling, time-consuming experiences have taught me that subscribing and unsubscribing don't always go smoothly. And if there are problems, you usually have to straighten things out with the help of list servers, which are machines. Or you can try to locate a person who can help you (which is possible . . . if you persevere).
How To Search Liszt
Searching Liszt couldn't be easier. There's a menu under the search box with choices for requiring that all these words appear in the results, any of these words, or this exact phrase. Because the universe of mailing lists is relatively small, you usually won't need more options than this, although more are available.
One caution: unlike most other search engines, Liszt will automatically consider your keyword as the root of a word, rather than the full word, and will return any results with that particular string of letters as part of a word. For example, if you enter dog, your results will include a list championing Teresa Doggett for Congress and a list discussing the Los Angeles band, Dogstar. If you want to find lists about dogs, enclose the word in quotation marks - for example, "dog" or "dogs".
Screening Out Private Mailing Lists
Liszt's database consists of 85,714 mailing lists, many (perhaps most) of which are private. (Some examples of private lists are members of a club, a college class, or a group of friends.) One way that Liszt tries to screen out private lists is by excluding any lists from its directory which have the word private in their description.
In addition, there's a junk filter which you can set for each search to screen out lots (of junk), some, or none. (Liszt defines junk as mailing lists which are private.) If you set the junk filter to some (the default level), your results won't include mailing lists with words like association, club, members, etc. Setting the junk filter to lots will retrieve only mailing lists about which Liszt has complete information.
