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Simon Williams wrote: > > There are currently 2 options: > > 1. Pay for an external mailing list service and somehow get a date-based > automated subscription/unsubscription system working with it. There are some very good mailshot companies, but it is hard to sort the good from the bad. And even the mediocre will end up being blacklisted by big mail providers every now and then, which may mean losing delivery of 10's of % of your list if it is AOL/Yahoo/Google/Hotmail. > 2. Put the mailing list on the fileserver at the BISC centre. The > problem is that it's a residential connection. At the moment it's > probably dynamic IP, which isn't really desirable for mass mailing. > Assuming I can get a static IP, I've still got to make sure we aren't > going to get blacklisted as spammers. Plus this sort of thing isn't that > simple, which is a problem considering that the IT system is maintained > entirely by casual volunteers who usually don't have any experience with > servers at all. Dynamic IP - forget it you'll never be able to manage deliver-ability issues. With a static IP it is perfectly reasonable for only 2000 people assuming the emails aren't huge. Just use a mailing list manager like Mailman. Probably seems overkill, but you get thing like bounce removal done right, and when they want a discussion based mail list it'll be easy to add. You will have this IP address listed as a spammer by someone sometime. But if you are sending genuine solicited email with a proper unsubscribe, and support proper contact addresses, no one who matters will block you (except hotmail and there is no one at the helm there). I'd be tempted to stick it on a virtual server somewhere, just to get it away from "casual volunteer" IT staff. Do they have a website you could host on same box to keep costs down? Simon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html