About Spam

a relational database-backed mailing list management system, provided as a service to the entire Internet by Philip Greenspun.

What it does

Webmasters at popular sites get a tremendous amount of email from people requesting that they add them to their mailing list. This can be very time-consuming, particularly if one does not have a mailing list. SPAM (TM) allows you, the Web publisher, to have a mailing list where people add and subtract themselves automatically. It is not a mailing list in the Listserv sense. You, the administrator, are the only person who can send mail to the list. Users receive mail that appears to have come directly from you. If they reply, it is directly to the email address that you specify.

If you fill out some extra forms, you can customize SPAM's response to users who add themselves and then use this system to deliver download instructions to users who have registered for a software trial.

How it works

The server is currently overloaded so we're not accepted new domains.

Underlying Technology

This is yet another AOLserver/RDBMS application. We wrote it in Tcl for the AOLserver API and the back-end is an Oracle8 relational database. The software is pretty simple. The hard part is keeping a relational database up and running 7 days/week, 24 hours/day.

webmaster@greenspun.com