Quoting Linus Sphinx (sphinxtar@gmail.com):
Does anyone still use listserv?
Nobody I know -- but L-Soft still offers it for sale. Got a spare $2,500 - $4,300 for a copy of LISTSERV Lite? http://www.lsoft.se/products/listserv_license.asp
It originated on BITNET in 1986 running on IBM mainframes, kept being maintained by author Eric Thomas while he worked at CERN, and then went with him to Sweden when he got hired by Swedish University Network (SUNET). In the early '90s, he refactored the code to make it easier to port, and released versions for VMS and Unix in 1994 (then for WinNT in '95).
L-Soft lost mindshare and market share to less-expense and less restricted alternatives ListProc and Majordomo during that decade, and eventually to full-featured open source competitors such as GNU Mailman, Sympa, and ezmlm.
The Linux/LUG world mass-abandoned Majordomo around 1998, the moment GNU Mailman proved feasible, having the advantage of an integrated Web-archiver (pipermail) and being open source, which Majordomo has never been.
I need to assemble an online bestiary of all credible open-source alternatives to Mailman3, because with the EOLing of all Python2 code, Mailman 2.x is not going to be feasible much longer -- and I still have doubts about Mailman3.
I'v started to put such a resource together a couple of times, but didn't keep my notes, darn it. So, need to re-research all that.