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AOL To Discontinue LISTSERV

Posted by Soulskill on from the yes-aol-still-exists dept.

alphadogg writes "On December 1, AOL will shut down its free LISTSERV-based mailing-list hosting operations, the company has told mailing list administrators. 'If your list is still actively used, please make arrangements to find another service prior to the shutdown date and notify your list members of the transition details,' an email notice sent out by AOL stated. At the peak of the service's popularity in the late 1990s, AOL was the third-largest provider of mailing lists, serving more than a million users."

4 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. This is huge news! by MyLongNickName · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I didn't even know AOL was still in business...

    --
    See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
    1. Re:This is huge news! by nospam007 · · Score: 5, Funny

      For you young whippersnappers, before you were born, listserv was/is like Twitter, just without any size limits.

      You just send an email to a server sign up^h^h^h^h^h^h^h follow someone or unfollow.

  2. This doesn't affect me in the slightest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I moved all my stuff to Compuserve last year.

  3. Loss of archives is going to be bad by JoshuaZ · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From TFA:

    ne list still somewhat active is the discussion list for AOLserver, AOL's open-source Web server software. The administrator for this list moved it to SourceForge, where the AOLserver code is housed. However, the administrator, Dossy Shiobara, noted that there was no immediate way to move the decadelong archives of this mailing list, along with related announcement lists, to SourceForge. Fortunately, much of the content is mirrored on other sites, however.

    Not all of the lists are going to have their archives mirrored. This is going to mean that a fair bit of internet history is going to get lost, and contribute a decent amount of linkrot in the process. While I suspect that most of that will just be inane flamewars, it always saddens me when data that could be preserved isn't preserved. I do hope that someone finds a way to move the archives of the various lists somewhere.