First and foremost, nothing is "getting worse" other than yet another mail-bounce issue, we have had hundreds of such incidents in my memory, all of them resolved by asserting the non-commercial and completely benign nature of the list to the acolytes and priests who run the mail servers.

Dunno what Apple's doing, but they are apparently not blocking 100% of Bee-L traffic, so there may have had a subscriber who could not work out how to unsubscribe, and reported the mail as spam to an overly-aggressive apple mail-filtering process.
(A link to the web page that explains how to do this should be in the footer of every message along with or instead of the L-Soft blurb.)


As for history, Adam Finkelstein and  I may be the last men still standing of the "Original Gangsta Bee-L", and Adam has not posted in years, so I'll outline below.

Ed Southwick was at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Brockport, and started up the first incarnation of Bee-L on bitnet.  The discussions were extremely "academic", because that was who had both internet links and bees.  Those of us who were computer geeks who kept bees read the posts, but very rarely inserted ourselves into the discussion, as practical beekeeping was not the focus of the list.   (I was not even yet keeping bees at that time.  I at last worked up the courage to post a question in the late 1990s, when I was expanding to 700 pollination colonies, and feeling the pain of managing teenage employees.)

There was a gateway built to copy bitnet groups over to usenet, so Bee-L posts started to be copied to "sci.agriculture.beekeeping" on usenet.  

Fun fact - a dial-up connection to either "The Well" on the west coast or "The Source" BBS modem pools on the east coast, allowed one to connect in an obscure, completely bootleg, and possibly illegal way to one's office and/or university computers using one's luggables (and later laptops), and turn one's personal computer into a VT-100 computer terminal, making the first "remote office" links.  

It was not until the mid-1990s that the general public could connection to "the internet" via subscriptions to dial-up links to The Well, Compuserve, The Source, and AOL.

As Allen said, Aaron was a database admin at U Albany, was a Bee-L subscriber, and adopted the Bee-L Listserv when Ed passed away, as each SUNY/CUNY Listserv needed a university employee to fill out the paperwork, and be the "responsible party". 

The old bitnet era messages are gone forever.  Aaron and I looked everywhere, I even drove out to SUNY Brockprort to look with Ed's former secretary through storage boxes of papers, looking for any backup tapes. 

The move to L-Soft's servers was prompted by U Albany blaming Aaron for missing a few deadlines.  Management did not examine their own lack of ability to admit that pert charts, gantt charts, and "milestones" had been around for decades, and that they needed to actually track progress on a complex project.  No, they focused on poor Aaron instead, who was working alone on most of the projects, and decided that he had been "distracted" by Bee-L, and told him to move Bee-L off the U Albany servers.  Someone who shall remain nameless and infamous also took umbrage at something Peter said about queen breeders, and made a very loud fuss at U Albany, but that was a minor detail.

L-Soft was nice enough to host Bee-L for free, out of the goodness of their heart,  Bee-L is one of the older continually-operating ListServs on the planet, so it is a minor cost for them, with lots of bragging rights.  That's a good thing, as the alternative hassle of running a web-based "bulletin board", like other popular platforms for club-level and "international" beekeeping forums, is excruciating.


All of the above was driven by a few key bits of work, I'll list below.  There are lots of accounts of "the history of the internet", but none admit that it was the poor neglected stepchild for decades, and only started to get respect when AOL started selling it as an extension of their wildly popular "message boards". 

In the 1970s and 80s, connections to the internet were limited to computer companies and universities.  It had been around since 1969s, and AT&T had famously declined to take over and **own** the whole shebang from the ARPANET program manager in 1971. Big mistake.

In 1971 "FTP" was created by an MIT student named Bhushan - "File Transfer Protocol", it worked, but it was a kludge.

In 1976, Bell Labs' Mike Lesk coded up "uucp" - “Unix to Unix Copy Program".   It allowed one to far more easily send files between hosts on the internet than FTP, and had a built-in "retry" for failed transfers, which was become crucial, as "the internet" was something that was delivered overnight, via phone modem links, each system relaying to the next on the chain, working without direct human oversight.

In 1979, USENET was created by grad students at Duke (Truscott and Ellis) it used uucp to send messages sorted into "discussion groups" on each local host server.

In 1981, bitnet was started with a link between CUNY and Yale, as ARPANET, and by extension, uucp and Usenet, were viewed as "evil military projects", and Harvard, NYU, and Rutgers were all on ARPANET, while Yale and SUNY /CUNY were not invited, so jealousy was a motivating factor here.  Bitnet did NOT use uucp.

All the above was only possible because (a) Digital Equipment Corp gave away free PDP 8 and PDP-11 computers to any university who asked (smart move, as it trained future executives to trust DEC computers)  and (b) Unix was also free to any university, as AT&T had  the same strategy as DEC.

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