ELMAR was founded in 1994 by Peter Palij, then a graduate student at Columbia.

ELMAR was the result of a conversation Peter had with Carl Mela in early 1994. Both were bemoaning the fact they had missed conference submission dates because they hadn't seen the paper flyers. It occurred to Peter that the solution was to form an email list where marketing academics could tell each other about conferences, interesting articles and chat about research ideas. Carl got to be subscriber #1. He was still a subscriber as of October of 2005!

The first Message was not dated so I cannot be completely sure, but I believe it was posted on either the 10th or 11th of March, 1994. It was a forwarded posting by Hal Varian, former Dean of the School of Information at Berkeley and frequent economics columnist for the New York Times. It is reprinted below:

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1) Subject: Economic issues related to the Internet [WWW server announcement]

[forwarded from the political economy list]

I've put up a WWW server at

http://gopher.econ.lsa.umich.edu/EconInternet.html

that contains various items I've collected about economic issues
relating to the Internet. This is currently under construction, but I
hope it will grow. Feel free to send me suggestions about useful
additions.

--
Hal.Varian@umich.edu Hal Varian
voice: 313-764-2364 Dept of Economics
fax: 313-764-2364 Univ of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220
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The AMA began to "sponsor" ELMAR sometime in the late 1990's. Frantic work is going on behind the scenes in the dusty archives to uncover the exact date.

Charles Hofacker became moderator in November of 2002.

Hardware support for the list switched from Columbia to the AMA on June 4 2003.