How To Start: The Mailing List

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

Attached is the "how to set up a mailing list" text.
Comments and criticism welcome.


	Christian

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Drive A: not responding...Formatting C: instead

Title: Setting up a Mailing List

Setting up a Mailing List

The mailing list is where the project's action takes place. Here plans and decisions are made, designs are discussed - everything important happens here. The mailing list is every (distributed) project's main home. To put it short: You need one.

Mailing List Hosting

Perhaps the best way to set up a mailing list is to ask your web host about it. All hosting services (well, at least those not solely targeted towards Joe and Jane user) also offer mailing list hosting.

Things to consider

Fortunately a mailing list setup is a relatively simple thing, there is not much that can go wrong and there are only a few "optional features" to care about:

• Some sites offer automatic archival of mailing lists. This is a very useful feature. For one, it means that every single mail that was ever sent to the list is stored at a central place and can be accessed from anywhere. Secondly, people new to the list can retrieve the mails of the past some days to get up-to-date quickly.
• A less common service (offered for example by SunSITE Denmark is the mirroring of a mailing list as newsgroup, making it possible to read and write mailing list posts both via mail (like with any other mailing list) and news (like with a normal newsgroup). This is especially useful if you are subscribed to the list with your home email address yet want to read and post from uni or work.
• Have detailed instructions on how to subscribe/unsubscribe to/from the list on your website. If people visit your site and become interested in your project they tend to subscribe to the list to learn a bit more about what's going on. These people are your main source of new developers, so treat them well and try to attract as many of them as possible.