E-Mail List Management Software
Outlook® or Pine® is useful for small lists with infrequent traffic.
However, if you think your list might have many members or you want to
simplify list maintenance, you may want to consider using e-mail list
management software.
Using e-mail list management software, you can create a single e-mail
address that broadcasts messages to a large group of subscribers. Most
software will allow the list owner to control who can join the list and
who can send messages to the list, thus reducing spam and creating a more
focused audience. Discussions on the list can also be moderated (the list
owner approves and edits all messages to be sent to the list) if desired.
Most list software makes it easy to keep an archive of past messages to
post as a reference.
E-mail list management software can also automate some processes. For
example, when a new subscriber joins your list, the software can automatically
send him or her a "welcome" message that explains the function of the
list and other important information, saving the list owner the effort
of remembering to do that for every new person. A "good-bye" message can
also be sent to people who unsubscribe.
For greater functionality, you can use software like LISTSERV® that
connects to a database. You can use the database to customize the messages
with individual passwords or personal greetings.
Popular e-mail list management software packages are described here,
although projects are encouraged to use Mailman if it suits their needs,
because the UW runs it on its servers and provides technical support.
Mailman
The UW hosts a Mailman
e-mail list server, and UW faculty, staff, or students can create their
own Mailman-managed lists as long as they have UW business or academic
reasons for them. Once a list is set up, anyone with an e-mail address
can subscribe to your list. Mailman replaced ListProc as the preferred
e-mail list software in June 2002 because it enables web-based administration
and can be used to create web archives of the messages sent to the e-mail
list.
Your list would be hosted on a UW mail server so it would automatically
have an official UW e-mail address, like researchlist@u.washington.edu.
The list owner can control and customize the list remotely by sending
commands via e-mail to the server. If technical glitches occur, the list
owner can alert UW Computing and Communications (C&C) to the problem.
UW C&C comprehensive answers
to questions about the Mailman software and its use. Some instructions
that you may want to view include:
Mailman is a powerful tool with many settings and options both for the
list owner
and list
subscriber. Look through them to see other specialized features.
LISTSERV®
Another popular list management tool is LISTSERV,
which has existed since 1986. (LISTSERV the software should not be confused
with the common use of "listserv" to refer to e-mail lists generically.
L-Soft, the manufacturer of LISTSERV, registered "LISTSERV" as a trademark
in 1996, making it a misuse to refer to e-mail lists as "listservs.")
LISTSERV has features comparable to those in Mailman, but the chief difference
is the ability to connect to a database. (By connecting to a database,
list owners can send personalized messages with individual names, passwords,
or notes.) See the comprehensive
list of LISTSERV features for more information.
To use LISTSERV, you will need to install it to a mail server, which
will distribute messages to the list. This might be a server that your
department or project owns. Your list's e-mail address will generally
be based on that server's domain or subdomain, depending on how the server
administrator has installed the software and set up the server, it may
be possible that a single machine is virtually hosting multiple domain
names. The list address may be something like researchlist@listserv.xyzproject.org
or researchlist@engineering.washington.edu.
The University of Washington does not own licenses to LISTSERV, so projects
interested in using it will need to buy their own. The versions of LISTSERV
that are suited to most UW research projects are LISTSERV Classic and
LISTSERV Lite (without database connectivity). See L-Soft's website for
a comparison
of the features in the two packages.
Pricing
for LISTSERV Classic is available by request from L-Soft. LISTSERV
Lite has fixed corporate and academic pricing structures. See the LISTSERV
Lite pricing chart for more details. LISTSERV Lite is also offered
in a free
edition for people who use it for nonprofit reasons, precluding research
groups from using it to create lists for people who license their software
for licensing fees. However, it may be acceptable for a research group
to use the free edition of LISTSERV to host a general discussion list
about its work to the interested public or to distribute software under
a royalty-free license to academics. Refer to the free edition's license
for more information.
Majordomo
The last list manager that this article will discuss is Majordomo,
which is a free tool that can be customized in Perl. It is similar to
Mailman in feature scope; even a Web interface is available if you add
on MajorCool, a CGI
script that combines with Majordomo. Skilled Perl programmers can also
adapt Majordomo in other ways.
Majordomo, like Mailman and LISTSERV, must be installed on a mail server.
Once Majordomo is installed, most commands can be administered by remote
e-mail without the list owner having access to the server.
Resource for Administering Your Own E-mail List Management Software
For more information about managing a Mailman list, review Aurora University's
Mailman
List Management Guide. For more background on the software visit
the developer's
website.
Other resources about e-mail lists are available on the Web; email.about.com is a good place to start.
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