Where there's a group of people you need to send emails to regularly, it's useful to have a way of automating the process. One way is to use the address book built into most email clients, which will probably allow you to group people together and send to them all at once. However, this is only useful if only yourself will ever mail things to that group. If you need broader access to a list of people, such as in a discussion list, it's possible to set up public mailing lists. These are also known as "mail exploders", because any mail sent to their address is duplicated and sent to each name on the list. Mailing lists are a very efficient way of distributing such things as newsletters or group discussions to large numbers of recipients.

Mailing lists vary in the way they are organised; some are publically available and open to mail from anyone, others are restricted to receiving mail only from the members or subscribers of the list. Yet others are moderated, where the list owner filters, edits or censors the mails that are submitted to the list.

Most mailing lists cover a single subject or group of people, and there are many thousands of public lists that you can subscribe to. To get started, take a look at the lists.ucc.ie which runs a range of UCC-related lists.