How mail lists (and address books) work in Mozilla.

Mailing list entries and nicknames for users who are in your address book are handled via a search and replace operation.  

When you type anything in one of the address fields when you're composing a mail message, Mozilla searches its address books and substitutes an email address for the name if it finds one.

For example, if you have an address book entry for mom@aol.com, and give it a nickname of "ma", if you compose a message addressed to "ma", Mozilla will find the "ma" nickname entry in your address book and replace "ma" with mom@aol.com automatically.

The same sort of operation occurs with mail lists. When you address a message to a mailing list, when you go to send the message, Mozilla searches its address books for the nickname or mail list name, then replaces the list name with a comma-separated list of addresses for the members of that list. 

For example, for a mail list called "family", that consists of mom@aol.com and pa@aol.com, if you address a message to "family", when you go to send the message, Mozilla will locate the "family" entry in the address book and replace it with ma@aol.com, pa@aol.com.

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