Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - ISO Best way to collect emails and set up mailing lists

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

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

Quote:

# Through-the-web list creation and removal (with automatic support depending on the MTA)
# Multi-lingual support: list web pages and email notices can be in any of nearly two dozen supported language, configurable per-site, per-list, and per-user
# "Real name" support for members
# Much better password-less operation for simple user tasks.
# Support for personalized deliveries and VERP-like message delivery for foolproof bounce detection
# Emergency moderation
# MIME-based content filtering, with demime/stripmime like options
# Regular expression based topic filtering
# Better membership management, including searching
# Re-organized administrative requests pages
# Moderated newsgroup support
# A new architecture for the mail delivery subsystem, removing the dependence on cron, for better responsiveness and scalability
# New moderation and privacy controls
# Invitations
# Autoresponse governors

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.