Listserv managers

July 19, 2004 12:16 PM

Listserv question. I have a friend who wants recommendations for either a low priced or free managed listserv (he is computer illiterate as are the people who will be subscribing) that has dead easy sign-up (enter an e-mail address, confirm your subscription, that's it). Or a free or inexpensive solution that he can install and administer without knowing squat. He has tried some Yahoo! thing but found that it required a Yahoo! e-mail address from the subscribers. This, apparently, was too confusing for the subscribers. I'm looking for personal experiences/recommendations since I don't know the first thing about listservers.
posted by Grod to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Yahoo! Groups require no such thing. They require only that the list manager have a Yahoo! account. I manage one tiny Yahoo! group (six people, including me. Only two of us have Yahoo! accounts) and subscribe to about 10 smallish-to medium-sized ones. There are a number of different ways to sign up for the lists there.
More to the answering of the question, though, I'm on a couple of lists provided by Topica, and they seem to work okay. Their advertising strikes me as more irritating than Yahoo!'s, but it's not horrible (and probably goes away if you pay for the service).
posted by willpie at 12:43 PM on July 19, 2004

May want to look at "Google Groups"... looks pretty straightforward...
posted by mhaw at 12:43 PM on July 19, 2004

Yep, seconding Yahoogroups...there are some amazingly dumb folks on a few of the lists I am on, and they seem to manage it. Also, I have no yahoo address, yet I'm on several Yahoo lists.
posted by GaelFC at 1:41 PM on July 19, 2004

notifylist.com is pretty cool, I use it and I'm fairly stupid and my Tandy is ancient. And it's free with no ads.
posted by chaz at 2:31 PM on July 19, 2004

listserv is a trademark of Somebody Else.

That said, if he has a place to host it, he should look at Mailman, the GNU mailing list manager. Not all that hard to set up, and damned easy to use. And it gets everything *right*.

If not, he should look around for someone who that's what they're running.
posted by baylink at 2:38 PM on July 19, 2004

Well, *that* was weird.
posted by baylink at 2:38 PM on July 19, 2004

I am running a listserv on Google Groups Beta, which is awesome, and just like Gmail.
posted by blasdelf at 7:31 PM on July 19, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. I've got him going with Google Groups 2.
posted by Grod at 7:37 PM on July 19, 2004