How to Start a Mailing List

$Revision: 1.6 $ $Date: 1998/10/13 07:17:54 $

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Introduction

One question I get with some regularity is how to start a MAILING LIST. This document attempts to be something of a checklist and ideas resource to assist people in approaching this task.

Also, and words or terms which from experience seem to confuse people are explained in the glossary at the end of this document. The first time I use one of these terms it will appear in upper case.

How do I find a host for my list?

1.: Check with your ISP. Many ISPs are capable of hosting mailing lists for their customers, and maintaining a list is almost always easier if it's close to home. Some even offer list services as part of the basic connection package, though the quality of the available services may vary widely.
2.: Check with others who you know to be interested in the topic. Often you will find someone who can get free list services at his/her ISP, or who has the technical expertise (and free time) to run the list for you. How acceptable this approach is will vary depending on the degree of control you need/wish to exercise over the list.
3.: Check with list admins/sites which are interested in related topics. Often if there are a number of lists at a site which are related to a certain topic, that site may be willing to host more such related lists for no or minimal cost.
4.: Check with list service providers. I maintain a list of these, which can be retrieved from http://www.gweep.ca/~edmonds/usenet/ml-providers.txt. You'll probably want to shop around a bit and compare the price and service level the different providers offer.

What list related services should I consider?

A mailing list can be an excellent resource all by itself, but with a few extra services tacked on, it can get even better.

1.: DIGEST lists. For people who are only mildly interested in a topic, particularly on a very popular mailing list, a digest subscription can be a great time saver.
2.: List archives. Basically keeping a copy of all posts to the list, and making them available to subscribers, and/or other interested parties. This availability can take the form of an ftp site, a web page, a web search engine, a mail server, or any combination of these. Obviously, the degree to which you make your archives available should vary with the nature of the material your list covers. Also keep in mind that even if you don't keep archives, some other subscriber probably will.
There are a few services now who will offer to archive your lists for you. This is potentially a valuable service, and you may wish to give serious thought to how you will respond when one of them approaches you, and they will. Personally I am leery of letting some unknown company get their hooks into my lists and have rejected all such offers to date, but you may decide otherwise.

Any other problems I might face?

There are also a few things you need to be aware of when starting a mailing list. First, it can take up a lot of your time, with a lot of this time being spent dealing with BOUNCES. You will also regularly get mail from newbies who need help getting on/off the list, as well as from subscribers who send posts to your address instead of the submission address. I probably spend at least half an hour every day dealing with this mail for the half dozen smallish lists I run.

Second, you will also at times have to deal with individuals attemping to SPAM your mailing list. All of my lists are configured so that only subscribers can post to the list, which has effectively eliminated all common spamming. Check with your list provider to see if you can use a similar approach. One problem with this is that some sites/users do not always send their email from the same address, so you may get incorrect mismatches, but this can generally be managed.

Related to spam is spammers using your subscriber list for spamming your subscribers directly. Look carefully at if and how your subscriber list is made available to others, and disable this access if possible. I know I get spam from time to time which was sent to an address which I have never used except to subscribe to one mailing list, and that list has been defunct for over a year.

How do I get more subscribers?

Or, in other words, how do you advertise your list? The best way I know of to do this is to create a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) document on the subject that your list covers. One of the questions should obviously be where to further discuss the topic, and the answer should contain subscription instructions for your mailing list.

Once you've created the FAQ, post it to the Usenet newsgroup(s) which are most related to the subject of your list. Keep this list of groups short though, as you really don't want to annoy people by posting it too widely; three groups is a good working maximum. Likewise, do not post it too often, typically once a month is adequate.

To supplement this, you should also make sure that the list is known to all the relavent collections and search engines. The two that I am careful to keep accurate entries with are the Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists (posted to news.lists), and Liszt, which is at http://www.liszt.com/.

If you have a web page for the list (for subscription information and archives access), which I highly recommend, you should make sure it is indexed by the web search engines, as well as submitting it to Yahoo and other such web catalogs.

Glossary

BOUNCES: A bounce is a copy of a mail message which could not be delivered, and is thus returned to the sender. On a properly configured mailing list, almost all bounces from bad subscriber addresses will go to the list owner (i.e. you) instead of the person who wrote the message. With a sufficiently big list, even a small percentage of addresses going bad can result in a large flood of bounces into your mailbox.
DIGEST: This is typically a companion list to a normal discussion list, where instead of all posts being immediately sent to all subscribers, they are collected for a period of time, typically a day or a week, and then sent as a single mail message. This reduces the clutter of a noisy list in the subscriber's mailbox, and also reduces the work for the mail server, as it only has to send one message to digest subscribers for a dozen or more sent to regular subscribers.
ISP: Internet Service Provider. These are the people you get your email from, be it AOL, MSN, AT&T, a university, or any of hundreds of other providers, big and small.
MAILING LIST: A collection of email addresses of people who are interested in a particular topic. Typically they are set up so that all email sent to a certain email address will be automatically resent to all the addresses on the list. Often membership in the list is controlled by software which responds to commands sent to another email address. By convention, this latter address is derived from the list address by appending -request to the username portion of the address. e.g. list@host.dom => list-request@host.dom
SPAM: There are many definitions of spam, but in the context of a mailing list, it typically means a post to the list which was not sent by a subscriber to the list, is usually off-topic, and is almost always intended for the commercial gain of the sender.

Brian Edmonds, October 13, 1998
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