Mailing Lists

Mailing list services provided with web hosting is typically designed to by used by community groups and organisations. The mailing list provided with your business email and web hosting service is Mailman, and like all mailing lists provided with hosting, is quite time consuming to configure and is more suited to inhouse applications than it is to email marketing.  It is a one size fits most solution to mailing lists but it is not and cannot replace a Customer Relationship Management System. If you are in business, and you want to collect email subscribers from your website for the purposes of marketing, building a customized mailing list system is preferable to using any mailing list software, such as MailMan. 

The benefits of using this mailing list program are;

• it is a moderated list, allowing members to send an email to a group email address and the moderator can approve or decline the email from being sent to all members
• it allows subscribers to unsubscribe and subscribe to the list and therefore, they can keep their email address up to date, thus minimizing the administrative burden on one person
• it allows for more than one moderator, so the work of moderator can be shared
• it has a digest feature, so you can access via the web, a list of all emails that have been sent to the group
• it has a customized homepage
• Users can sign up and unsubscribe via a web form and suspend mailings while they are on holidays

• Users no longer need to send Majordomo-style commands to the mail server asking to be subscribed.

• For full documentation and frequently asked questions, visit http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Home 

The disadvantages of this mailing list programs are;

• nearly all mailing list programs that come free with web hosting have been developed on the open source model. They are fiddly to configure, if you have specific requirements and are more suited to community groups than business applications. This is because originally mailing lists were not developed for businesses but for programmers who wanted to use mailing lists to collaborate on projects. Typically, most companies either use a specialized mailing list service or have a mailing list designed and built for their corporate website. Mailman can be configured for business applications but it is rather time consuming to do and the results will be limited. eg.  http://wiki.list.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4030547
• it requires the moderator to authorize emails to be sent out. An alternative, if you do not want a moderated list is to set up a Group email address. There is no password protection on the group email address, which can be used to send email to all members of a group.
• it requires time to configure the mailing list to work the way you want it to and you will need some knowledge of HTML to edit the HTML pages that are generated by the list.

This mailing list service is included in all email hosting and web hosting plans.

Features

Mailman offers you the ability to configure your mailing list to work in many different ways. You cannot think that it is a quick set up - it is not. You need to go through each option and make sure that it is configured the way you want your list to work and test that it does work the way you want it to work. 

To set up your mailing list, you need to login to http://domains.passioncomputing.com.au and navigate to the link that says "Zone Files'. In this area, you will need to create the correct zone file records. In particular, you need to create an A record, called lists pointing to the same ip address as the webmail A record. If you are unsure about how to do this, send an email to sales@passioncomputing.com.au and we will set it up the correct zone files for you. We however, cannot help you to configure Mailman. You will need to consult documentation http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Home and have a play around with the software, to get it working - just the way you want it to. Like all software, MailMan has limitations.

You then navigate to 'Hosting Control Panel'

Click on this link and navigate to the page below by clicking HOME > MAIL > Mailing Lists

When you click on "Add Mailing List", it will take you to the following screen. The administrator will receive a detailed email with instructions on how to set up the list.

Wait for the email with instructions on configuring the way your mailing list will work.

In this screen shot, we have called, the mailing list, 'group1'. You then, need to add members to your list, either via the interface below or using the instructions on the system email that will be sent out to you. The latter option, has the ability to directly import a group of email addresses.

After you click on 'add new member', the following screen will appear and you should add the email address of your test subscriber.

This will take you back to the screen where you will be able to add more test subscribers.

Later on, you can create additional lists with their own unique subscribers and use the admin area to turn lists on and off.

Once, you have set up a few test members for your list, send out a test email, making sure that you include your email address in the list of subscribers. Make sure the list works like you expect it to before sending out any real emails.