E-mail Listserves : Start Your Own

Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell.

With the exponential growth of e-mail, e-mail lists, commonly called "listserves" have become very popular. Listserves can be used in one of two ways:

a) You can send out information to all your members/customers.
b) You can create a discussion group that allows all of your members/customers to speak amongst themselves.

E-mail has become a ubiquitous part of our lives. Nearly everyone has at least one e-mail address. Many people have more than one! E-mail addresses are being given out for free by the major Internet portals, such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

Why create a listserve?

First we'll talk about option (a). Listserves allow you to send out information to all of your "subscribers" by using a single, easy to remember e-mail address. For instance, instead of remembering ALL of the e-mail addresses of people that would like to receive the Help2Go newsletter, I just send ONE e-mail to a special address, which automatically does the work of passing that e-mail on to thousands of people.

The listserve subscribers will not be able to reply to my message -- this type of listserve is for sending OUT information only. If you use this type of listserve, you must also give your customers an e-mail address to which they can submit questions. Help2Go's e-mail address is posted prominently in all of our newsletters.

Option (b) allows for a sharing of ideas between your listserve subscribers. This is often used in an academic environment so that students can converse with the teacher and each other, but it also has its uses in a business or nonprofit environment.

A business can host a discussion about uses of their product, tips, and troubleshooting. By using the collaborative, helpful spirit of an Internet community, your customers will be able to help each other with problems and therefore lower your business' customer support costs.

An organization can host such a list to further the discussion of ideas pertaining to the organization's purpose. Not only does it offer a sounding board for your organization's members, but you will find that the discussion will provide dozens of new ideas and approaches that you might have never discovered. The discussion will also keep your members interested and informed about your cause, which will only serve to improve your membership rolls.

Creating a listserve

OK, you're convinced. Now, how can you go about setting up a listserve of your own? If your company has a dedicated mail server on the Internet, you should look into L-Soft's Listserv software. L-Soft pioneered the whole listserve software industry and has the best quality products available.

However, if your organization or business doesn't have money to spend on a listserve, there are great options available. Several Internet companies have sprouted up in the past few years, offering listserve services for free. The most popular are Yahoo Groups and MSN Groups.

A caveat: these free services will add a sentence or an ad to the bottom of each e-mail sent through the service. It's pretty innocuous, and we think it is well worth the services that you get. Try it out!

We greatly prefer Yahoo Groups, where Help2Go's own email list is based, and so now we're going to take you through the steps to create your very own listserve for free. (You may want to print this article out now, so you can refer to it as a reference).

A Yahoo Groups Listserve: Step by Step

1) First, click here to go to the Yahoo Groups site.
2) Click on the link to Start a Group Now.
3) If you've never registered at Yahoo before, click on the link that says Sign Up Now. Otherwise, skip to step 7.
4) Fill out the registration form and agree to the license agreement (after reading it, of course).
5) Next, an e-mail will be sent to you asking you to confirm your new membership. Follow the instructions in the e-mail.
6) Once you are confirmed, return to the Yahoo Groups web site and click on Start a Group Now (it may ask you to sign-in with your Yahoo ID and password.
7) Now we have reached the Group configuration page. You will need to fill in the required fields and choose how you want your list to act. The different questions are explained below:

Yahoo Directory
Yahoo keeps a directory of all the groups their service hosts. Choose an appropriate category and sub-category for the group you are creating.

Group name/e-mail address
This is the actual name you will give your listserve. The name gets added to "@yahoogroups.com" and becomes the e-mail address that you would use to send messages to the whole group. Do not use any spaces in the name (it won't work) -- try to use dashes and underscores instead. Also, it is NOT case-sensitive, so "Help2Go" is the same as "help2go".

Type of Group
You have three choices now.
* Unmoderated means that any subscriber can post any message to the group. Choose this option if you want a discussion-type list (option (b) at the beginning of this article). However, do not choose this option if you are afraid of hostile or profane posts.
* Moderated means that any e-mail sent by a subscriber to the list must first be approved by you before the rest of the group can see it. This is also for a discussion-type list. This demands significantly more time and effort than an unmoderated list, but you won't have to worry about profane, hostile, or off-topic posts.
* Newsletter/announcement is for lists where only you send out information (option (a) at the beginning of this article). No-one can respond directly to the list, so only your emails are seen by your subscribers.

Membership
Your list can be Open, meaning that anyone who stumbles upon it can join freely and without your permission. Otherwise, your list can be Moderated/Restricted, so that only you can approve new subscribers to the list.

Descriptions & Language
Next, you must describe your group, both briefly and at length. The last option is to choose a primary language for your list.

8) Read the Terms of Service, and then click the Accept button.
9) The final step is to invite people to join your list. You don't have to complete this section now -- you can always invite more people to subscribe whenever you want.

Once you have finished all the steps, you will be presented with a link to your group's home page. It should look something like this:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mygroupname

This web page is your groups' new home on the web. This is where you administer every facet of your new list. If you chose to have a moderated/restricted list, then you may be spending a lot of time on this page, accepting members and approving posts. However, if you created an open list or a newsletter, then you may not have to see this page at all!

The greatest feature of Yahoo Groups is its flexibility. There are many other sites out there that provide a similar service. We just chose Yahoo Groups for our tutorial because we felt that it was the easiest to use.

Have fun creating those listserves! And if you create an interesting group, send us an invitation to join!

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