Email Management/Listserv

December 6, 2006 10:19 AM

Continuing the not-for-profit theme, my small company (full time staff of 5) is looking for an email management system on the cheap and easy. We are looking for the following: management of multiple member lists for email blasts and newsletters, web-based sign-up, subscribe/unsubscribe services, and so forth. We'd like to be able to design a template in html and implement new text rather painlessly. RSVP lists for events (ala evite, I suppose) are an added bonus.

Searching the askme archives I see recommendations for Mailman. I've heard myemma's commercials on NPR, but they seem a bit on the pricey side. Thanks for your help!

posted by pinto to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Not to piggyback, but for Christmas I wish Santa would bring me an app or a plugin that that takes snapshots of webpages built with javascript and dumps to file the state of the current dom tree as html.
posted by judge.mentok.the.mindtaker at 10:22 AM on December 6, 2006

You might check out Civicspace, which is now a hosted service. The underpinnings are Drupal, and drupal modules, which are all open source.
posted by Good Brain at 10:24 AM on December 6, 2006

Mailman is pretty much the de-facto standard of free mailing list management tools, assuming you can handle hosting it yourself somewhere. It's what I use, I love it, and it supports everything you've asked for.
posted by autojack at 10:37 AM on December 6, 2006

Best answer: PHPList. Details here. It's been good for me.
posted by elle.jeezy at 10:43 AM on December 6, 2006

LISTSERV is actually the grand-daddy of email list management servers, and is a product of L-Soft International, which provide both the software to run on servers of your own, or powerful list hosting services you can operate yourself (and add to existing Web sites), at reasonable costs. In many ways, LISTSERV remains one of the best ways of operating mailing lists, due to features of the LISTSERV software that vastly reduce administration headaches, and simplify troubleshooting mail loops, non-deliverables, bounces, and broken forwards. And the LISTSERV hosted services have some of the highest delivery rates, and fastest services for some of the very largest mail lists in the world.

I've operated lists on LISTSERV and on local servers, other mail hosts, and various domain hosting providers, and LISTSERV is still far and away the most flexible and powerful list management solution I've ever used.
posted by paulsc at 11:12 AM on December 6, 2006

I used Constant Contact pretty intensively at my former employer; I liked it okay, but I was in the process of migrating to MyEmma when I left to take a new job. (I liked MyEmma's features better, and the folks there were super nice.) I use Vertical Response now, and I see that they offer special pricing for Non-Profits. There's also MailChimp, which is targeted towards users who can build their own HTML templates.
posted by junkbox at 11:41 AM on December 6, 2006

Response by poster: PHPList looks great--and I must say the rudimentary design on Mailman's website scares me a little. But PHPList states flat out that they differ from 'group mailing' services such as Mailman--what gives? I can't tell the difference.
posted by pinto at 12:00 PM on December 6, 2006

Isn't Mailman python based? That's what made me put it aside.

There's no discussion list aspect of PHPList. Users sign up for a list you've created, but there's no free form chatting back and forth via email or archiving of threads, activities, etc. That's something that Mailman and Listserv do.

PHPList is more for sending newsletters, announcements, etc. as you describe in your request. It has robust subscribe and unsub, features. etc. plus, you can put your own templates, which I did not find to be that difficult. You just put in the proper tags, upload the images (if you're using them). Plus, if you have the proper apache modules installed, you can email a page from your site to users as well.
posted by elle.jeezy at 12:35 PM on December 6, 2006