Students Of Success

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———————————————————- Use a
List-server to Distribute Your Newsletter

By Stephen Bucaro

If you publish an e-newsletter or e-zine, you know that
administering your subscriber list is a big chore. To maintain
the list, you may be using an email program on your computer or
a CGI program on your server. One advantage to maintaining the
list yourself is that you know it is not being shared by anyone
else.

However, there are four good reasons why you should host your
list on a list-server.

1. People can subscribe or unsubscribe from your list
automatically with absolutely no work by you.

2. People often subscribe with an email alias or forwarded email
account. You send your newsletter to one address, then receive a
delivery failure or unsubscribe from an address not on your
list. You can’t delete it from your list.

3. People subscribe to the list and then forget that they
subscribed. They accuse you of spamming. This can’t be avoided
entirely, but if your list is hosted on a list-server, you can
respond by saying “all subscribes and unsubscribes are handled
automatically by the list server, you have no control of it.”

4. If you plan to sell advertising in your newsletter, most
advertisers and advertisement networks will require you to
verify your subscriber count. If you maintain the list yourself,
the only way you can do that is to share your list with them.
You don’t want to do that.

If your list is hosted on a list-server, the number of
subscribers is there for all to see, provided by an independent
third party.

Choosing a List-server

Many list-servers disappeared in the “.com” bust. The best one,
listbot, was bought by Microsoft. It is now called bCentral and
costs $30.00 per month. Being a list owner, it is your
responsibility to keep your list private. With the well
publicized ethical problems at Microsoft, I would not put my
subscriber list in their hands.

Most of the lists ended up on Yahoo. They are in the domain
http://groups.yahoo.com. I find yahoo groups very complicated to
configure. I also worry about Yahoo’s privacy policy. Yahoo
Group Help states, “If you use Groups, it is very likely that
other users will be able to see your email address.”

http://www.topica.com has the easiest to setup list-server.
However, it is primarily a group mailing list application that
must be configured correctly to perform the newsletter list
function. Topica’s privacy policy states, “The email addresses
of participants are partially obscured so they are not
obtainable by unauthorized visitors.”

Configuring the List-server

To make a list server function as a newsletter list requires
that you modify its default configuration. The following
configurations should be set.

1. List Type: Read-only Announcement list. Only the owner of the
list can post messages to the list.

2. Subscription: Does not require owner approval for people to
join the list.

3. Archive: Readable by subscribers only. If non-subscribers can
read the newsletter, why should anyone subscribe?

Using the List Server

Now all you have to do is post your newsletter to the list and
it will be delivered to all the subscribers. You will still be
required to deal with delivery failures. If the reason for the
delivery failure is because the email box no-longer exists, then
you should delete that address from your list immediately.

A delivery failure can also occur because the email box is too
full, or because the mail server is down. You should establish a
policy for dealing with delivery failures. You have three
choices.

1. Ignore them and let the number of messages returned because
of delivery failure grow to enormous size. Advertisers will not
use newsletters if they find out they are paying for a large
number of non-deliverable addresses.

2. Delete them immediately. If you do that, you may be removing
many subscribers who only have the temporary problems mentioned
above.

3. Keep a delivery failure address on your list until it fails
three times. After three consecutive delivery failures, it is
unlikely that the situation will clear up, so you may as well
delete the member.

If you want to publish a quality e-newsletter or e-zine, you
need to spend more time working on content and less time
administering the subscriber list. For this reason, you should
use a list-server application. But make sure that you are
comfortable with the operation of the list-server before you
commit your valuable subscriber list.
———————————————————-
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