Mailing List Basics
Email is truly the "killer app" of the Internet. It may be
the most useful invention since the telephone. Many a
grandmother, who ordinarily wouldn't touch a computer with
a ten-foot pole, has taken the plunge and gotten set up with
a computer and an Internet account, once she realized that
far-flung grandchildren reply to email more readily than
to letters. It's a huge morale-builder in the military,
allowing service people to stay in touch with the folks back
home from literally anywhere in the world. The post office
tells us that the volume of paper mail has declined
substantially since email started to catch on. Email is
even good for the environment, as it means less paper is
consumed, and less oil is burned delivering the paper.
Personally, I've been a devotee of email for years. I love
how it allows me to stay in touch while on the road (I'm
writing this by the side of a mountain stream in
Switzerland), and how it lets me cut down (slightly) on
the mountains of paper that can so easily take over a whole
office. In fact, I use email for almost all my correspondence,
and am scornful of those poor souls who still piddle around
with archaic technologies like faxes.
Email will probably bring world peace and cure cancer too,
but enough praise for now. The focus of this article is how
a Web site owner can use email-based mailing lists to
improve the utility of a Web site, and increase visitor
traffic. Some writers have pointed out that, while the Web
tends to attract all the press (and investor dollars), the
less-glamorous technology of email is in fact even more
useful, and is used by even more people. But email and the
Web are simply two different ways of transferring information,
and each is appropriate for certain applications. In this
article, we'll discuss how you can use automated mailing
lists to boost your Web site traffic and make your site more
useful.
Email Aliases
Every Webmaster should understand email aliases, an
extremely useful feature of most email servers. When you
have an alias set up on your mail server, then any messages
that are sent to the alias will automatically be forwarded
to the email address(es) of your choice. Pretty much all
mail servers allow you to set up aliases. Most Unix shops
use a mail server program called
Sendmail
which lets you create
aliases by editing the file called "aliases."
For example:
Webmaster@CompanyName.com: joeblow@aol.com
As long as this line is present in the "aliases" file, all
mail sent to Webmaster@CompanyName.com will be forwarded to
joeblow@aol.com. The process is invisible to those who
send the messages.
Aliases can serve many useful purposes, besides the obvious
one of concealing one's identity. Alas, all too many people
do put aliases to evil uses. Fly-by-night business people
and lazy tech support staff use them to hide from irate
customers, while spammers use elaborate trails of aliases
(much as money launderers send cash through a series of
banks) to escape punishment for their vile deeds.
In the example above, however, Joe Blow is concealing his
direct email address for a (reasonably) legitimate business
reason. His customers don't need to know that he is a lowly
AOL user. For businesses, an AOL (or Yahoo, or Mindspring,
or really, any other ISP domain) address is the equivalent
of a mailing address in an apartment complex (perhaps a
low-rent one). An email address with your own domain,
however, indicates that you are a serious businessperson,
or at least that you have $70 to register a domain name,
and enough computer knowledge to set up an alias.
By establishing the alias webmaster@companyname.com, and
posting it on his Web site, Mr. Blow has made things a lot
more flexible. If he changes ISPs later on, he won't have
to change the email address on the site - just the alias.
If someone else takes over the webmaster's job, or if an
assistant webmaster is added to the team, no hassle - just
change the alias.
An email alias can be used as a simple mailing list. For
example, staff@companyname.com could be set up to go to
all members of the Web team, or vendors@companyname.com
could go to a list of people you do business with. Of course,
you can do the same thing from within an email program such
as
Eudora or
Outlook Express, but the alias has the advantage
of being accessible to anyone at any time.
Speaking of email software, all of the top email clients can be
used to create rudimentary mailing lists. As I mentioned
above, you can set up the equivalent of an alias (called
a "nickname" in Eudora, a "contact" in Outlook Express),
which is handy if you want to send the same message to a
group of people. Another way to do this is simply to paste
all the recipients' addresses into the BCC field. Make sure
you use BCC (blind carbon copy), not the regular CC (carbon
copy), so that the recipients will not see who the other
recipients are. For our younger readers, "carbon" refers
to sheets of paper covered with sticky black goo, that were
once used with typewriters to make copies.
Useful as the above techniques are, they suffice only for
simple uses, and are not adequate for anything that we would
call an actual "mailing list." A proper mailing list requires
mailing list software, which runs on the server and handles
mailing list tasks automatically. Recipients must be able to
join and leave the list at will, and there must be a way to
prevent unauthorized users from posting to the list.
