Announcement Lists

Announcement lists allow you (and anyone else you designate) to send an email message to your entire list of subscribers.

We will give you a secret address that you put in your BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field of your email message. You send one message to our computers and our system will broadcast your message to all of your subscribers.

Each subscriber on your list will receive your message, but they cannot send a message to your list. Each message is sent out individually, and your subscriber will see their email address in the To: line, and they will not see anybody else's email address. You may also select the option of putting their email address at the bottom of your message.

Your email address will be in the From: address line of your messages, allowing your subscribers to reply directly to you. We can also substitute some other email address into the From: line, should you have a special address for people to reply to.

Most announcements lists are open to anybody that wants to join. Either they send a blank email message to yourlist-on@mail-list.com or they sign up at your web site.

When our machine receives a request to join your list, it will send back a confirmation message. This confirmation message will have a random number in the Subject line. When they reply with that same random number, we know that nobody was forging their email address, and our machine will add them to your list and send them your welcome message. This is called confirmed opt-in.

In another situation, your messages contain proprietary or private information, and you will want to approve each subscriber. Or perhaps your membership information is stored in your database on your computer, and you will simply export the email addresses and upload the entire list in one email command.

Your message to your list will contain a clickable URL that will allow people to unsubscribe with two clicks of their mouse. Or they can simply send a blank message to yourlist-off@mail-list.com to remove themselves from your list.

When your subscribers change their email address, they can send a message to yourlist-change@mail-list.com, with their old email address in the Subject line. Our system will remove their old email address, and add their new email address to your list.

If there are any bad email addresses on your list, they will be automatically removed after a few bounces.

Some list moderators like to review their message before it goes to the list. This extra round trip between our servers and you also adds another layer of security.

mail-list.com is setup by default to convert any HTML email sent to a list to plain text. Plain text URL's are clickable (like http://www.mail-list.com), and will take your subscribers straight to the web page you specify. For AOL and CompuServe subscribers, we automatically converts the plain text URL into a clickable format.

mail-list.com only stores the email address of your subscribers. We do not maintain any other information, like name, address, age or income bracket. So we cannot personalize your email. This is a simple list serve, designed to allow the same message to quickly go to a number of different subscribers.

mail-list.com does not insert any advertisements in any message. What you send is what your subscribers receive. Nor does mail-list.com rent, sell, use or abuse your email addresses. Our computer hardware and software simply handles the clerical tasks of administering your mailing list.

The list owner pays a small fee for hosting their mailing list with mail-list.com.

You may choose to use our list archives on the world wide web, where your previous messages can be seen with a web browser. A search engine that encompasses just your mailing list is included. You may choose to block the general public or robots from your web archive with a password. Everybody on your list will use the same password, which you may change as needed.

You may choose to use your own domain name, and hide the mail-list.com domain name. In order to accomplish this, your domain name techie will need to set up new mail aliases for 8 different email addresses associated with running your list. Such as the on and off addresses, address for bounces to come back, address for the list owner. Sometimes this is an easy task and sometimes not. If in doubt, start with mail-list.com, get things going, and then change it to your domain name later.

Most lists have a web page that allows people to subscribe and unsubscribe. A program called a CGI is needed to email our machines what they typed in. Typically your web hosting company provides these programs, and you simply need to tell it our specific email address. If not, we can provide HTML for you to copy and paste into your web site. This HTML will call our CGI on our server, allowing people to get on and off your list from your web site, without any involvement from your web host.

When you send a message to your list, our machines send the plain text version of your email to all subscribers. This eliminates a range of problems with HTML email. Should you have a special situation and need to send HTML email to your list, please contact us.

mail-list.com handles all the administrative chores of running a mailing list, allowing you to concentrate on your message.

Announcement lists are ideal for

• electronic newsletters
• press releases
• late breaking news
• new research and product announcements
• price and service updates

mail-list.com has been running mailing lists since 1995, and has helped thousands of clients get millions of their emails delivered to their subscribers.

If you want to get your message delivered to your subscribers, please set up your new client account now.