No, it is not like Dejanews because it is not a newsgroup. Dejanews lets you look up old postings to newsgroups, which is sometimes useful to see where certain people have been hanging around and making posts, and what they have posted. (And let that be a warning to all who think that their newsgroup posts end up in never-never land after a brief period.:))

The Scottish Music and Culture list and the Irish Trad list are e-mail lists. You have to subscribe as above, which tells the listserver (the computer that looks after the list) that you want to send and receive messages to the list. It comes in as e-mail, and as Bruce O. says you can sometimes get quite a pile. the Scots Music and Culture list "postings" are archived at http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~ibb/scd/Music/ so remember that anything you say during the course of discussion or argument eventually gets put onto the World Wide Web. I don't know if the postings are culled for relevancy first.

I don't know the procedure concerning the Irish Trad list or if it is archived on someone's web site. I have stayed away from it as I have a habit of sometimes not being able to avoid an argument or discussion, and I am told (as Bruce O. says above) that if you are looking for an argument the Irish Trad list is the place to find it.:)(My information is that bodhran players should tread lightly!:))

Oh, and make sure you know how the list works before you make a post. On most lists, if you post "Reply to Author" it will go to everyone on the list because the e-mail comes not from the author, but from the list address. This can be embarrassing if you want to post to a friend on the list "Look at Murphy! The fool has never talked a word of sense in his life." Everyone on the list including Murphy gets the e-mail. The Scots list is like this. On other lists, if you hit "Reply to Author" it only goes to the author of the individual e-mail to which you are responding and no-one else gets to see your words of wisdom.

There is also a trad ballad list, the subscription info for which I do not have but which I may hunt down one fine day. (Maybe someone could post it here.) You might be able to find it through http://www.liszt.com but there are now literally thousands of mail lists on every imaginable subject, so it is often time consuming to frame a search to find what you want. When you do, the subscription information is given. There are mail lists relating to specific instruments too, and the music of a great many different nationalities. It is fun to do a Liszt search sometimes just to see what obscure interests have a sufficient following for a list.

I assume that you already know about the newsgroups, rec.music.folk , rec.music.celtic , and uk.music.folk .