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

dtheriault · 01-03-2005, 01:30 AM

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?

aurigus · 01-03-2005, 06:52 AM

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.

bendsley · 01-03-2005, 11:28 AM

majordomo is another good mailing-list piece of software.

01-03-2005, 01:30 AM	#1 (permalink)
dtheriault Psycho Location: maybe utah	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? __________________ "Remember, it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen." -Homer Unless you are the freakin Highlander, what is the point in learning how to fight with a sword?

01-03-2005, 11:28 AM	#3 (permalink)
bendsley Professional Loafer Location: texas	majordomo is another good mailing-list piece of software. __________________ "You hear the one about the fella who died, went to the pearly gates? St. Peter let him in. Sees a guy in a suit making a closing argument. Says, "Who's that?" St. Peter says, "Oh, that's God. Thinks he's Denny Crane."