I want to be the Puppetmaster. Of email.

February 17, 2010 8:28 AM

I'm looking for recommendations for an email mailing list service that will allow me to manage not just lots of different lists, but lots of lists with different administrators.

I work in the web department of a relatively large school district, and we're looking for a new mailing list service. I've looked at Constant Contact and MailChimp and a few other services, but none of the ones I've found do what we need, which is as follows:

Each of the 30 schools in our district has a mailing list for parents and community members. Under our current system (Lyris ListManager, hosted and administered by another organization), the principal of each school composes an email using their district email account and sends it to [e-mail], and then it goes to all their subscribers.

This aspect of our current system is great for our busy principals because all they have to remember is an email address. It's also great for me, because all I have to do is set up the lists and grant the principals administrative rights. But our current service is having some technical problems they seem unable to fix, so it's time for a new service.

So far, all the mailing list services I've looked at allow each customer to have multiple lists of subscribers, but all those lists are accessible from just one account with one username/password. We don't want to give 30 principals access to just one account with 30 lists in it, and I definitely don't want to send out all the principals' mailing list messages myself.

So I need something that will:

a) allow one account administrator (me) to log into a website, create multiple sub-accounts (principals), each with its own separate login and list of recipients, or
b) allow me to create multiple groups and give the principals an email address they can use to send mail to their list, as we're doing now.

I realize that we could just install ListManager on our own server, but our web department is stretched really thin, so I'd like to avoid that if possible.

Are there any services out there that will meet our needs?

P.S. Email templates and/or HTML functionality would be cool, but are by no means our greatest need.

posted by bluishorange to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: You could do this from CampaignMonitor. If you make every administrator a subclient, they can log in and send stuff to their own list. You can own the master client and access all their stuff.

It's also pretty intuitive to use. Cost is 5 $ per campaign + 1 cent per sent mail if I remember correctly.
posted by NekulturnY at 8:32 AM on February 17, 2010

This is probably really really dumb, but could work as a stop-gap measure if you are unable to avoid a single master account type scenario, but don't want to send all the emails yourself.

With mail filters (in mail.app for sure, prob. Outlook too) you could have emails coming from the principals forwarded to the list account email. So you'd have 30 filters redirecting emails from Principal Bob of George Washington HS to the GW HS list. Maybe ask the principles to include #listserve in the subject line, and make that a criteria in your filters. It would probably be best to create a separate, generic email account like "[e-mail]" to do this with.

This way you could continue with a self hosted solution (schools are cheap), but not have to babysit and send everything yourself.
posted by fontophilic at 11:12 AM on February 17, 2010

Historically, Mailman (runs on Linux) is a choice for running internally this kind of service, but it's not really been updated for a while. Sympa is another option. In terms of hosted solutions, you could use Google Groups, or possibly more branded and controlled by you, Google Groups on Google Apps for EDU (free to educational institutions). You don't have to activate any of the other services (mail, sites, docs, etc), but you can activate Google Groups alone and get all that they offer.
posted by idb at 11:37 AM on February 17, 2010