In recent years there has been an enormous growth in electronic messaging. It is an outgrowth of the desire during the Cold War in the mid-1960s to create a non-centralized, low-maintenance network as a means to “provide for robust, survivable communications links in the event of wartime disruptions.” Soon thereafter, scientists developed communication protocols, or rules, to facilitate the transmission of personal messages and, thus, “e-mail” was born. Today, protocols also exist to support Usenet newsgroups, World Wide Web pages, information search services, and remote file access. This article will focus on a form of messaging known as the “mailing list,” which allows computer users to exchange e-mail messages with all others in a group, who are known as “subscribers.”
Michael Hirohama (1997) studied this question.