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GCN Home > April 3, 2000 issue

State finds that e-mail lists can advance the cause of diplomacy

Timely, relevant information is tailored by subject and region for receipt by a worldwide audience

By Pamela Houghtaling
Special to GCN

Each night, the State Department disseminates policy news to internal and external audiences around the world via electronic mailing lists.

Chip Harman, a webmaster in the Office of International Information Programs at State, started using Listserv software from L-Soft International Inc. of Landover, Md., to reach a wider external audience by tailoring mail lists to specific regions or themes.

The mission of the office, which was part of the U.S. Information Agency before its merger with State, is to present official information—policy statements, speeches and reports—to foreign audiences of journalists and senior government and corporate executives. Harman described it as an overseas press office for State and therefore the federal government.

Harman takes the documents from a diplomatic Web site and delivers them directly to subscribers’ desktop PCs. “Using a mailing list gives you the assurance that people have a high level of interest in your message and are reading your material,” he said.

Materials can go out to the various lists manually or automatically as they are posted on the Web site. Editors of specialized thematic lists sometimes send messages alerting subscribers about how to retrieve large files rather than automatically sending them.

Bandwidth issues arise in sending documents to international addresses, however. Harman said he must be sensitive to the volume of materials transmitted. North America and Europe have fast networks, but the bandwidth available in Latin America and Africa is much lower, he said.

Extra credit

Listserv, the 1986 brainchild of 19-year-old college student Eric Thomas, automates server handling of additions and deletions and other list administration chores. Thomas founded L-Soft to license Listserv and provide hosting services. The latest version, Listserv 1.8d, has a Web interface.

Harman said he chose to outsource his mailing list deliveries to L-Soft’s ListPlex hosting service. Maintaining a list server in-house is fairly complex, he said. Also, L-Soft had technical support available worldwide, and “the sun is always rising on one of our users,” he said.

Harman prefers to focus his time on content and matching the audience to the appropriate information. It’s easy to create a list, he said, but much harder to keep it alive and sustain the audience, because information must remain timely and relevant.



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