Mailing Lists for Web Sites (part 1)

Mailing List Basics

Email is truly the "killer app" of the Internet. It may be the most useful invention since the telephone. Many a grandmother, who ordinarily wouldn't touch a computer with a ten-foot pole, has taken the plunge and gotten set up with a computer and an Internet account, once she realized that far-flung grandchildren reply to email more readily than to letters. It's a huge morale-builder in the military, allowing service people to stay in touch with the folks back home from literally anywhere in the world. The post office tells us that the volume of paper mail has declined substantially since email started to catch on. Email is even good for the environment, as it means less paper is consumed, and less oil is burned delivering the paper.

Personally, I've been a devotee of email for years. I love how it allows me to stay in touch while on the road (I'm writing this by the side of a mountain stream in Switzerland), and how it lets me cut down (slightly) on the mountains of paper that can so easily take over a whole office. In fact, I use email for almost all my correspondence, and am scornful of those poor souls who still piddle around with archaic technologies like faxes.

Email will probably bring world peace and cure cancer too, but enough praise for now. The focus of this article is how a Web site owner can use email-based mailing lists to improve the utility of a Web site, and increase visitor traffic. Some writers have pointed out that, while the Web tends to attract all the press (and investor dollars), the less-glamorous technology of email is in fact even more useful, and is used by even more people. But email and the Web are simply two different ways of transferring information, and each is appropriate for certain applications. In this article, we'll discuss how you can use automated mailing lists to boost your Web site traffic and make your site more useful.

Email Aliases

Every Webmaster should understand email aliases, an extremely useful feature of most email servers. When you have an alias set up on your mail server, then any messages that are sent to the alias will automatically be forwarded to the email address(es) of your choice. Pretty much all mail servers allow you to set up aliases. Most Unix shops use a mail server program called Sendmail which lets you create aliases by editing the file called "aliases."

For example:
Webmaster@CompanyName.com: joeblow@aol.com

As long as this line is present in the "aliases" file, all mail sent to Webmaster@CompanyName.com will be forwarded to joeblow@aol.com. The process is invisible to those who send the messages.

Aliases can serve many useful purposes, besides the obvious one of concealing one's identity. Alas, all too many people do put aliases to evil uses. Fly-by-night business people and lazy tech support staff use them to hide from irate customers, while spammers use elaborate trails of aliases (much as money launderers send cash through a series of banks) to escape punishment for their vile deeds.

In the example above, however, Joe Blow is concealing his direct email address for a (reasonably) legitimate business reason. His customers don't need to know that he is a lowly AOL user. For businesses, an AOL (or Yahoo, or Mindspring, or really, any other ISP domain) address is the equivalent of a mailing address in an apartment complex (perhaps a low-rent one). An email address with your own domain, however, indicates that you are a serious businessperson, or at least that you have $70 to register a domain name, and enough computer knowledge to set up an alias.

By establishing the alias webmaster@companyname.com, and posting it on his Web site, Mr. Blow has made things a lot more flexible. If he changes ISPs later on, he won't have to change the email address on the site - just the alias. If someone else takes over the webmaster's job, or if an assistant webmaster is added to the team, no hassle - just change the alias.

An email alias can be used as a simple mailing list. For example, staff@companyname.com could be set up to go to all members of the Web team, or vendors@companyname.com could go to a list of people you do business with. Of course, you can do the same thing from within an email program such as Eudora or Outlook Express, but the alias has the advantage of being accessible to anyone at any time.

Speaking of email software, all of the top email clients can be used to create rudimentary mailing lists. As I mentioned above, you can set up the equivalent of an alias (called a "nickname" in Eudora, a "contact" in Outlook Express), which is handy if you want to send the same message to a group of people. Another way to do this is simply to paste all the recipients' addresses into the BCC field. Make sure you use BCC (blind carbon copy), not the regular CC (carbon copy), so that the recipients will not see who the other recipients are. For our younger readers, "carbon" refers to sheets of paper covered with sticky black goo, that were once used with typewriters to make copies.