Email Lists

Previous posts have discussed various options for setting up a Museum mailing list


Since then I have tried out Maillistking

This resides on your hard disc and manages the entire database via email. Its a 60 day trial and the support is pretty good. The main problems was that it really wants to receive emails via Outlook express, and I had problems getting my system to recognise subscriptions. But if you use outlook express its worth a try.

I also came across PHPLIST which you put on your web server and which manages your email list. As a new comer to PHP programming I found setting it up difficult - in fact it is very, very easy to set up but I just had difficult finding out how to refer to my MYsql database as this is the first time I had set this up.

Phplist seems to work very well once you have got over this hurdle. It is free and tincan, the distributers will set it up for you for a small fee.

I am planning to use it because it means we can send emails to the list and manage it from 2 sites without much difficulty as it is web based not resident on your hard disc.

The one shortcoming I can find is that you don't seem to be able to send an email to the list by sending an email - you have to load the email via the admin control panel.

The alternative is to set up a list server either commercial or academic. The following is an email Jack Kirby sent me which explains the options better than I can:

I've been forwarded your enquiry regarding email lists. I manage the Social History Curators Group email list and (with my colleague Tilly Blyth at the Science Museum) the Science, Technology and Industry SSN email list.

Both these lists use the same underlying software, Listserv, and similar interfaces. The STI-SSN list is hosted by Jiscmail (www.jiscmail.ac.uk); the SHCG-LIST by Mailtalk (www.mailtalk.ac.uk). Both are run by the Council for the Central Laboratories of the Research Councils, an academic organisation. The difference is that Jiscmail is provided free to academic institutions where lists are expected to have a certain proportion of academic members - the Science Museum were able to get this because they have @nmsi.ac.uk email addresses. For SHCG we used the commerical Mailtalk service which costs £100pa for up to 100 members or £250 for up to 500 members. This has been extremely good value; both services are easy to use, highly configurable and have excellent anti-spam and anti-virus defences. They can be configured to be open access (so people can join themselves, as with STI-SSN) or by approval of the list owner (as with SHCG-LIST which is only open to SHCG members). All messages posted can be made accessible via web interfaces.

Both services also offer the option of Discussion Rooms, allowing real time communication through web browsers; not sure if this what you mean by online forums. We have never used this feature as experience with a previous version of the SHCG main website suggests that a forum would not be well-used. You might be thinking more of something like MDA's online forum (join via www.mda.org.uk) which offers a better web interface. However in my experience professional web-based forums do not attract sufficient numbers of postings to make them worthwhile. The problem is that they are essentially a 'pull' technology that requires you to 'pull' people onto your site to look at the forum - and how many busy professionals have time to log onto a website regularly unless the content is very good and frequently updated? Email lists by contrast are a 'push' technology that pushes messages out to everybody signed up, increasing the likelihood that they will be read and replies will be received. This is just a personal opinion though, so don't let it put you off exploring forums further if you have evidence of demand.

Jack Kirby
Science & Industry Curator
e: jack.kirby@thinktank.ac
w: http://www.thinktank.ac
t: 0121 202 2279
f: 0121 202 2320
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Millennium Point Curzon Street
Birmingham B4 7XG
Registered charity no. 1061898

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