ISO Best way to collect emails and set up mailing lists
 

My SO works with a large high school. The staff would love to be able to collect parent emails from the site. Things they would like to do with the email addresses.

1. Send out school notifications and newsletters.
2. Have parents sign up for notifications like sports, art performances, testing info etc....
3. The emails could be grouped by graduating class so they can be better organized, or dumped after graduation.

Any ideas or solutions?

Easiest / Cheapest way? Set up a Mailman mailing list:

http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/

This would need to be done by someone with the kind of knowledge needed to set up something like that - that person would be the server admin at your school if you have one or if not it would need to be outsourced.

I would suggest that you make one for each class, and then make one for each of the events you want to send out notifications for. The class lists can be dumped after they graduate, but the emails would remain on the events lists (which is a good thing, I know a lot of parents/students like to keep aware of events even after graduation). That software includes web-based subscription management for the subscriber and admin making it easy to subscribe/unsubscribe - I think it is double-opt-in too which makes it almost impossible to get in trouble for any sort of "spam" complaints which is often a problem with mailing lists.

majordomo is another good mailing-list piece of software.