[Techtalk] Alternative ways to implement a mailing list...

[Tamara Harpster]

Yes, it's common to have e-mail aliases used to point multiple addresses to
one address. In many cases, that is the default behavior for a web site, is
to receive e-mail from a multitude of addresses and send it to one e-mail
address that is defined either by the web hosting or the user.
Unfortunately, in this case, spammers know about this capability and once
they find out a domain name is active they send out bogus e-mails to common
e-mail addresses like info@, web@, etc to that domain name. Since everything
is piped into one address, the spam is accepted and you get lots and lots of
spam. Which is why I've now turned off that option for my web hosting
account. :-)

On the mailing list manager I realized that there are two kinds of mailing
list managers and I only have background using one type. The first type is a
list like this one for linuxchix, where people can subscribe and respond to
e-mails from other people through a central server. The other type of
mailing list manager is designed more for news letters, where a web site
owner wants to send out information to customers or interested people but
does not expect any replies back to the main list. It is this second type of
software that I am used to using on websites and I'm not sure if this will
answer your needs.

On your questions about setup, yes, it would be transparent to the users,
they would sign up on a website and receive e-mails back when using the
second type of MLM. For the first type, I'm not sure if there are scripts
that support that functionality or not, I wouldn't be surprised if there is,
I'm just not familiar with them and I'm also not familiar with how users
would respond.

For the installation, the PHP scripts would likely consist of a set of files
that you would copy up to your web server. There would either be an INSTALL
or README file that would describe how to setup the files. In the better
written scripts all installation would be done through the web. Once the
scripts are installed, you would either reference the main script from your
website or include a linke to a script or scripts from your web site. My
experience has been that most PHP scripts are fairly easy to install and
have automatic install scripts that make the experience much easier than
Perl used to be years ago.

tamara

On 5/24/06, Jason Landry <jaselan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Just to make sure I've got a handle on this thing.... So -- if I
> understand correctly -- with sendmail, postfix, et al, one can -- via
> the "alias" mechanism -- define a "list" of e-mail addresses and then
> point another [single] e-mail address at this list..?. So when I saw
> that my hosting plan had a whole 2000 aliases, I went hey, that's that
> thing; I can have a hyper primitive ML here..!. When I hit the web
> configuration interface though, I went hey; where's the part where you
> "define" the list of aliases? So anyway -- I'm still waiting on the
> provider's answer -- have you ever heard of that before; i.e. a web
> hosting plan with e-mail addresses AND the ability to use an "alias"
> mechanism to point one e-mail address toward several?
>
> I'm aware that there are hosting providers (e.g. like yours) that have
> "real deal" MLM options and support, but I was just wondering about
> this "e-mail alias" issue as it would pertain to cobbling together a
> [manually managed] mailing list. Thanks.
>
> A quick addendum to the question on script based web MLs... are they
> transparent to the user? i.e. the user continues to use their
> MUA/Gmail to send and receive msgs, or do they have to visit a web
> page and interact from there?... Thanks Chix.
>
> -- J
>



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