Free Mailing List Managers For YouMost of the companies use mailing lists to inform the public about new products and the other interesting things going on at the company. Since the number of people in mailing lists tends to increase very fast, it is recommended to use mailing list managers to send your e-newsletters and emails. You can easily get free mailing list managers as there are a number of options available. Three of the best mailing list managers have been discussed here. The first and arguably the most popular of all mailing list managers is GNU Mailman. Since the solution is a part of the GNU family, it is software libre and is available free of cost at the same time it is also free to change and adapt. Mailman was one of the first mailing list manager solutions to get a web based interface for management of the mailing lists. The software is written in Python. The drawback with the software is that it only runs on a Unix based mail server like like Qmail, Postfix or Sendmil. When GNU Mailman is integrated with a Exim mail server, the entire process becomes automated and the need to create aliases is eliminated. The other option is 'phplist'. The software is written in the PHP scripting language, hence the name. All the mail data is stored in the MySQL server. This mailing list manager can integrate with almost every major web server. It is meant to be primarily used by website administrators who want in site features for registration and sending of email newsletters to all the subscribers. The system also comes with a nifty web interface and the list administrator can easily manage the lists from anywhere. The main strength of phplist resides in its robustness and scalability. The solution is primarily meant for 100,000 + subscribers. It can be easily scaled to manage smaller list but unlike GNU Mailman, this solution is not meant to be used as a group mailing list manager. It can only handle one way email lists. The software has integrated domain throttling features which ensures that your mails do not get branded as spam. Another popular mailing list manger software is Majordomo. This solution can be considered a veteran of the field. It raised to popularity in 1992 and has since been one of the most popular mailing list manager software. This means that the software has been around even before WWW became widely used. The registration process and removal from the list is handled by emails instead of usual web based registration where people have just type their email address and hit the Enter key. Mailing list managers have come way ahead since Listserv was first released in 1984 Ricky Hernandez, Daniel Oberst, and Ira Fuchs for the BITNET. Today mailing list managers are unprecedentedly easier to deploy and administer and are a major part of a company's marketing arsenal. |