Listserv integrated with wordpress?
March 17, 2016 5:18 PM   Subscribe

I have a bike club wordpress site. I want members to be able to send an email to the "rides@club.com" site and reach all members.

Any plug-ins to set this up? I thought it would be elementary but all I've found are primitive plug-ins. Seems this is ancient tech so nobody cares in age of facebook?
posted by mtstover to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Is rides@club.com hosted on the wordpress site? Or somewhere else (gmail, some other webhost, etc?)

I would typically think that this just wouldn't be part of the purview of wordpress at all - the emails would come and go out without ever really touching wordpress itself, right?

I haven't set up a listserv in years, but when I did, it was just a program that ran on your server that had all the mail for certain addresses sent to it.

A more primitive version is called an "alias" which is just a file you edit, where you say "rides@club.com" should be copied to this list of addresses. On your hosting setup you may not have access to this.

Google groups is a pretty good method if your mail is hosted on google. If your mail is hosted other places I'd have to poke around to see what the equivalent would be.
posted by RustyBrooks at 5:22 PM on March 17, 2016


Response by poster: rides@club.com is an email address on the wordrpress bike club's domain. Obviously the email can go anywhere.

I was trying to do an integration through wordpress as there are other member activities that we would want to do there (signups, payments, maybe a forum), so synchronizing users across the listserv and on the wordpress membership would be great.
posted by mtstover at 5:53 PM on March 17, 2016


OK - but is hosting the email on the wordpress domain even an option? I don't know if you're self-hosting or what. I stopped managing my own mail this year because it was becoming more of a PITA. I don't know how common it is for small WP hosts to let you receive mail there.
posted by RustyBrooks at 6:20 PM on March 17, 2016


Response by poster: Yes it's no problem - have several email addresses up and running.
posted by mtstover at 6:40 PM on March 17, 2016


Best answer: Many smallish hosting packages include access to mailing list software such as Mailman, which would run on the same server/domain as your wordpress installation. If I were setting up something like this (and I have), I'd probably just have a "click here to join our mailing list" on your wordpress site and call it good. I don't think you want the email to be tied directly to WP because some people aren't going to want to sign up for your mailing list and perhaps vice versa. (For most of my use cases, I had more people on the Listserv than members of a WP site. Most WP members were Editors, and regular Members were just Listserv subscribers.)

But if you do want a plugin (and your membership is small enough not to worry too much about potential performance issues), here's an option: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-mailing-group/
posted by instamatic at 6:44 PM on March 17, 2016


Best answer: You really want to run a mailing list management app so that it is doing all the right things that mean that you won't get flagged as spam or spoofed email etc. Mailman works great, is free, and it looks like there is a mature and popular mailman/Wordpress integration plugin. Why not just use that?
posted by rockindata at 7:00 PM on March 17, 2016


Best answer: L-Soft is the company that invented LISTSERV; it's their trademark for that kind of mailing list software (and yeah, they kinda hate that their product has become a generic term for mailing listware), and they're still around (I'm acquainted with one of their developers) so, without having any familiarity with their current products, it's safe to say they've evolved with the times and may have something that fits your needs. If it's the real LISTSERV you have in mind for your needs, then maybe it now does what you want it to do.
posted by Sunburnt at 7:04 PM on March 17, 2016


Best answer: Seconding the Mailman Wordpress plugin. I use it for my home-brew club's subscribe/unsubscribe functions. Haven't tried to do more. Mailman is an easy setup with Dreamhost.
posted by terrapin at 7:12 PM on March 17, 2016


Best answer: I like Mailman and recommend it, but I'd advise testing any no-longer-supported WP plugin on a test installation instead of your live site. That plugin is a major revision out of date, hasn't been updated or had any support requests filled in months, and only has about 100 live installations. Any one of those issues alone is potentially no big deal, but all of them together = test somewhere unimportant first.
posted by instamatic at 7:17 PM on March 17, 2016


Response by poster: Awesome guys -- I didn't know about Mailman. Will check it out. Don't necessarily need integration so will try it standalone first.
posted by mtstover at 7:21 PM on March 17, 2016


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