[vox] [OT] Simple mailing list service?

[Ken Bloom]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2004 at 11:57:37AM -0700, Jeff Newmiller wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, Mark K. Kim wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone know of a simple mailing list service that lets admins
> > add members without needing each individual's approval (either via
> > e-mail or web interface)?
> 
> Opt-out spamming implementation, anyone?  Knowing you, I understand
> that your intentions are worthy, but consider the raw
> requirements...
> 
> [...]
> 
> > We basically wanna get over the hurdle of member apathy.
> 
> Somehow, email doesn't seem like a very effective way to get over
> apathy, given the daily battle with spam that many people are
> losing.
> 
> One-on-one contacts are much more effective... the question is
> whether you can build a group of evangelists to implement some
> one-on-one contact strategy, and put results of those contacts into
> a shared database.

I understand the sentiments here, but consider a synagogue or a church
where people are in contact with each other one on one, but you want
to make sure everyone hears about events directly from the source. Now
suppose that the person responsible for sending out event information
has been putting everyone on the bcc line for a while, but that method
has just gotten too unwieldy, so now everyone needs to be added
en-masse to an email list to simplify mailings.  It would be nice to
add people without requiring the lag to wait for the stragglers to
respond to the invitation (because you're just changing the
infrastructure to do what you've already been doing). That's when
subscribing people without their confirmation is useful.

I understand this looks like spamming, but the difference is really in
the number of people being reached by the emails. A spammer's list
with only 300 people is not very effective, but when YahooGroups had a
100 person per day add-limit it would only take 3 days to get everyone
into the group. A spammer who works with thousands of email addresses
would take days or months to get everyone into the group.

-- 
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