[thelist] Mailing Lists: Another Tack

Dan Romanchik dan at danromanchik.com
Mon Nov 18 13:52:01 CST 2002


I've been reading about mailing list scripts on this list for quite a while
now. I've even downloaded several packages, including PHPList, VList Lite,
and at least one other, whose name escapes me. While these are all good
packages, they all suffer one big disadvantage. That is, they don't receive
e-mails. This limits their usefulness in a couple of ways:

   1. You can only use them for announcement-only mailing lists.
   2. They don't track delivery and returns.
   3. You can't use them for open mailing lists.

Instead, what I've been thinking of doing is building a front end to the
mailing list services run by Topica or SparkList. This would let me:

  - build subscribe/unsubscribe pages that look like the client's website,
  - write code that would let me manage paid subscription newsletters,
  - use the service's tools for subscriber management and delivery tracking,
  - use the services tools for ad management, and
  - offer open mailing lists that subscriber can use to communicate
    with one another as well as announcement type mailing lists.

It's not free to do things this way, but the price is pretty reasonable, I
think, for the extra functionality. On Topica, for example, if your volume
is under 10,000 e-mails per month, the cost is $225 for as many lists as you
care to set up (if you pay annually). If your volume is less than 25,000
e-mails per month, the cost is $405. If you're running a non-profit website
that may pinch a little, but if you're running a commercial website, that
cost is certainly not prohibitive.

I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't already a package out there that
does this, but I haven't yet found one. Does anyone know of something like
this or have other ideas to offer?

Thanks for your attention!

Dan
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Dan Romanchik - Web Developer
dan at danromanchik.com, 734-930-6564





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