On OpenVMS and UNIX, users can also create their own PMDF personal mailing lists. Such personal mailing lists are defined using the PMDF DB utility or PMDF MAIL's ALIAS commands on OpenVMS, or using the pmdf db utility on UNIX, and the definitions are stored in the user's personal alias database. Such personal mailing list definitions are therefore quite akin to system mailing list definitions that might be stored in the PMDF system alias database, but made at a user level.

Users can either choose to keep their personal mailing list definitions entirely private---only the user himself can use the list definition to send to the list. Or users can choose to mark some of their personal mailing lists as PUBLIC lists; in that case, other users can send to the first user's personal mailing list by sending to firstuser+listname@domainname That is, users can make PUBLIC (i.e., "publish") their personal list definitions as subaddresses of their own address.

See the appropriate edition of the PMDF User's Guide for additional details.