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.

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.