atomicbird

For a little more than three years now I've used a mailing list to keep in touch with customers and others interested in my software. This has been incredibly useful for me. Although early adopters and digerati and such have mostly moved toward things like RSS feeds, I still find that a significant portion of my customers get most of their information the (relatively) old fashioned way.

If you look around the site as of today though, you'll see there's no way to sign up. And therein lies a tale. This is kind of a long post, so you'll need to actually click through to the post to get the whole story.

I still subscribe to lists like this in some cases, even though I subscribe to more RSS and Atom feeds than is really healthy. I get Other World's periodic mailings of current bargains, for example.

Don't Be Evil

When doing this kind of thing, the biggest, most important, never-break rule is DO NOT SPAM. Most of the subscribers to my list are customers who have signed up for the list using a checkbox in my web store.

Note that the box above is unchecked by default. Customers don't get added unless they decide to check it. The rest of the list subscribers joined by way of a form that used to be over there in the sidebar. It used a standard double-opt-in approach: you entered your email address and clicked "subscribe". Then you got a confirmation email, and you were only subscribed if you opened the enclosed URL in your web browser.

With this approach I've never had anyone accuse me of spamming, even though the list now includes about 10,000 people.

Of course I'm also not exactly filling up people's inboxes. I've only actually sent messages to the list 12 times since 2004. Most of the messages were announcements of new applications or new versions. Others included an announcement of the MacSanta promotion last December, and one message warning people against some dangerous advice that appeared in MacHome magazine a few years ago.

Making it Work

If you're going to send 10,000 emails, you need to stop and think a little about how you're actually going to do it. Your favorite email application is not the right tool.

Since the list's inception I've used the excellent Dada Mail for this purpose. Dada Mail is a free (GPL) web-to-email system with minimal system requirements. Once installed (easy) you use it by pointing your web browser to your Dada Mail installation, typing up your message, and clicking "send". It's possible to extend Dada Mail and use it as a two-way discussion-style mailing list, but that's not important to me.

Dada Mail provides a number of nice features, like the simple double-opt-in subscription system (and similar for unsubscribing) and a nice web interface for both. It'll also nicely handle HTML formatted emails-- it can auto-generate a plain text alternative and send the message as multipart, so those who like the HTML get it while those who prefer plain text get what they like. It's got a number of nice features that make it good for my needs, like keeping list archives that are also available as an RSS or Atom feed.

Dada Mail has worked so well for me that I've never even bothered to upgrade my copy. Looking at the Dada web site now I see that I've missed out on a number of new features. I never reached a point where I had to have more, though-- it just did the job, every time I wanted to use it.

Nontechnical considerations

Dada Mail's system requirements are simple enough that it'll run on nearly any web hosting account you might have. But that's not the whole story, unfortunately. I mentioned earlier that I've sent a total of 12 list messages in three years, but it's actually more like 11.5. My most recent attempt was cut short by my web host (Pair) when they noticed the messages going out. Apparently Dada Mail violates the terms of service, which prohibit people from installing their own mailing list software. The sending process was cut short, Dada Mail's files were suddenly owned by root, and I was being referred to Pair's abuse department. That's never good.

Pair support suggested I try pairList, their mailing list system included with hosting accounts. I wasn't sure it was usable because it's been in what Pair describes as an "... ongoing testing and development phase..." for something like five years now. Even Google betas don't last that long. They assured me it was ready for use so I looked into it.

The Swiss Army Knife of Mailing Lists?

PairList uses GNU MailMan (or just MailMan if you want to annoy RMS). MailMan has a long history and could probably be considered "mature". It's got about sixty zillion features and configuration options.

The more I looked into MailMan though, the less I liked it. I don't want to run down MailMan, because it's got a lot going for it, but it's not really suited to the kind of list I want to run.

The first that hit me was the process of trying to customize a MailMan list into my announcement-only list. MailMan has a web interface but it's not complete. I could customize some things through my browser but not all. Even basic things like getting rid of the big ugly footer it puts on every page (including for example a horribly pixelated version of the GNU logo) were impossible. MailMan wants people to enter their real names (which don't matter for my list) but I couldn't get it to indicate that this was optional. It insists on assigning every subscriber a password, which it'll then expect them to know and which again is irrelevant to my needs.

Some of this could be blamed on Pair's setup. MailMan is open source, and I write software, so in theory I should be able to customize whatever the hell I want. But I found it increasingly hard to excuse the fact that I would need to customize the source code to get what I wanted. It's got a web interface, why wasn't this stuff included?

The more I worked with MailMan, the more it seemed not so much the Swiss Army Knife of mailing lists as the Microsoft Office of Mailing Lists. It's trying to be everything to everybody, and in the 10+ years of its development feature creep has reached the critical stage. I was spending a lot of time trying to stop it from doing stuff that might be useful to someone but that I didn't need or want. In the meantime things that I did want seemed missing. I might be able to shoehorn my list into MailMan but only at the expense of making things more difficult for both list subscribers and myself.

Despite the featuritis, MailMan still doesn't have stuff I'd want for my list. Take the HTML email handling and auto-generation of a plain text alternative I mentioned earlier. With Dada Mail this couldn't be much simpler-- create the HTML however you like, paste it into the message window, and you're done. Recent versions of Dada Mail even include FCKEditor, giving you WYSIWYG HTML editing right in your browser. With MailMan? You're on your own, pal. I tried some experiments sending "rich text" emails in Apple's Mail.app, which are sent as HTML. They looked nice going out, but after passing through MailMan there were weird rendering problems (e.g. duplicated images). I could try and figure out why it doesn't work but I'm already investing too much time trying to make MailMan do a job it's apparently not intended for.

Those test messages raised another annoyance-- the fact that everything goes into the list archives, even tests. I had gotten used to Dada Mail's preview messages, which run a message through the sending process but only send it to the list owner. That's handy, and another thing I missed.

It's not that MailMan is necessarily bad, it's just not the best tool for this particular job. For discussion lists with a lot of active participants, MailMan is probably a good choice.

What now, boss?

The obvious solution is to find a web host where I can use Dada Mail. The Dada web site helpfully includes a list of Dada-friendly hosts. I haven't used any of them but I've heard of a couple and I'm checking them out.

This is where you come in. Help me out with a little information if you can. Have you ever used any of the hosts on the list, and if so were they any good? Do you know of any web hosts you'd recommend where I could use Dada Mail but that aren't listed on that page? Thanks for any help you can provide. My subscribe/unsubscribe system has been offline for a couple of weeks now and I really want to get it going again.