Sympa List Service - Sublists and Superlists

Some mailing lists are organised into families or groups within a subject area. A sublist is any list in such a group and the superlist (usually with a name like something-all) is a co-ordinating list, or the head of the family. Any message sent to the superlist will reach all the lists which belong to that family or group.

Superlist and sublist structure
Example of a Superlist and sublists

In this example, any message sent to the superlist musicology-all will be distributed to the lists musical-aesthetics, med-and-ren-music and euromusicology.

Notes:

  • You don't need to join a superlist to receive messages, just the sublist.
  • Even if someone belongs to several of sublists, (e.g. musical-aesthetics and euromusicology in the above example) they will only receive one copy of the message sent to the superlist.
  • You can't stop messages from the superlist, unless you leave all the sublists.