A Listserv, or Listserve, is method of communicating with a group of people via email. You send one email message to the “reflector” email address, and the software sends the email to all of the group’s subscribers. 

The group of people have all joined because they share a common interest. That shared interest might be a hobby, recreational pursuit, educational, work related, health related, or members of a family keeping in touch.

People can get on and off (subject to the list owner’s approval) by themselves. There are separate email addresses for these administrative functions.

There are millions of listserves, or electronic mailing lists on the Internet. Some are free like Yahoo Groups and Google Groups. These groups are supported by ads that can appear in each email message. And by selling the demographic and behavioral attributes of your list members to advertisers.

Other listserve hosting companies charge money to pay for the software, computers and bandwidth. Typically the list owner or organization pays the fee, and allows subscribers to join for free.

There are two different types of electronic mailing lists.

1. One way announcement lists, where only the list owner can send a message
2. Discussion Groups, where any subscriber can post a message

The common thread is the listserv software that manages the subscriptions, handles bounces, and gets the email message out to small groups of 10 people up to very large groups of hundreds of thousands of people.

There are many different brands of listserv software, including Majordomo, Smartlist, GNU Mailman, Sympa and Listserv itself. These software packages provide the ability to subscribe, unsubscribe, go on vacation, process bounces, and send messages to the lists.

And there are many different words used to describe a listserve, including mail groups, email discussion groups, online discussion group, electronic mailing list, discussion board or message board.

Yet they all allow people to bypass time and space, and communicate with like minded people from the comfort of their email inbox.

There are some social manners to observe with email, and these netiquette rules apply to email mailing lists.

First and foremost, you cannot send unsolicited email. That is called spam and it can get you in trouble with your Internet Service Provider, as well as the United States Federal Trade Commission. That means that all of your subscribers must have volunteered to receive your email.

Second, be careful with the tone of your message. It is easy for readers to interpret your message differently than what you meant. In particular, it’s easy to read anger into a message, when none was intended. Remember that there is no body language, or voice emphasis to give the readers clues.

Along the same lines, jokes and sarcastic remarks are frequently misunderstood. You may want to include special symbols to point out your attempts at humor. The standard smiley :-) is the most frequently used symbol to convey humor.

Third, never expose the email addresses of any of your subscribers. The BCC field will hide the addresses from everybody else, so use that if you are running your own list.

You will want to have a meaningful subject line, yet not too long. That’s because some email readers will only display a certain number of characters. Keeping your Subject lines under 50 characters is a good goal.

Keep your messages short and focused and preferably only cover one point in an email.

All capital letters in email, implies SHOUTING, and should be used where shouting is appropriate (which is not that often). Emphasis can be added to individual words or phrases by surrounding them with asterisks, *like this* or CAPITALIZING just the few words needed to make your point.

Use abbreviations sparingly, and be sure that your typical subscriber will already know the abbreviations that you do use.

Check your spelling and correct all errors before you send your message out.

Computer viruses, trojan horses, and worms (collectively called malware) are bad for computers. Because they can delete or corrupt files on your hard disk, intercept your bank account password when you login, or turn your computer into a zombie, that is controlled by somebody else remotely.

Not only do you not want malware on your computer, you don’t want to send it to anybody on your list of subscribers either.

Computer malware can be spread via email attachments. We have had viruses in PDF’s, MS Word Documents, executable programs, Flash videos, pictures, music, and about any other file type that you can think of. The computer virus scanners currently know about more than 1 million different computer viruses.

Computer malware can be spread in HTML email, because HTML has a feature that allows small programs to be downloaded and run on your computer. Java, Javascript and VBscript are examples of these types of languages. When you see rotating graphics, pop-up windows, and other fancy web page effects, it is typically small programs written in these languages that are doing the work. If the program was malware instead, bad things would happen to your computer.

HTML email can also allow linking to websites that contain the malware. The program was not downloaded inside the email, but brought in from the remote server. This type of malware is called cross-site scripting.

Plain text email cannot, and never has been used to send a computer virus. So if you only send plain text email, then you will never spread computer malware, even if your own computer is infected.

mail-list.com only sends plain text email, but does allow attachments to be included. Our system scans any attachments with two different virus scanners, to insure that we never ever spread computer malware.

For More Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_virus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_computer

Plain text email is is readable and understandable from the most powerful computer with the biggest monitor, to the cell phone with a 4 line display.

However, there is one thing you will want to do before sending out your email, and that is to make sure you have a carriage return character after every 60 or so characters.

That’s so your email does not come out looking like this.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing
elit. Vestibulum
eget sem vel lectus malesuada mollis vitae non
lorem. Praesent eget
magna odio, malesuada congue metus. Duis aliquam,
est ac rhoncus
pretium, lacus leo adipiscing felis, at vehicula
justo massa quis
urna.

Because some of your subscriber’s email readers may alter your email to shorter lines.

You can transform your paragraphs of text into short lines, free of charges, by using the online tool at

http://www.formatit.com/

Simply paste your article into the online form, choose how wide you want the lines, and it will do the work.

How wide to make each line is a personal choice, and the narrower the column of text, the easier it is to read. That’s why newspapers are divided up into narrow columns of text.

You now know everything you need to know about plain text formatting, while it would take a large book to describe all the rules and exceptions for formatting HTML email. That’s because there is no standard for HTML email, and every email reader and every online mail system does things a little bit differently.

So there are some advantages to following the KISS principle of Keep It Simple Stupid with emails to groups of people.

mail-list.com has an option that will automatically format your outgoing emails to the width that you choose. So you can just write your email and send, without worrying about this little detail. Our system will also translate the “curly quotes” from Microsoft Word documents into “straight quotes” that are readable in everybody’s email reader.

It’s challenging to display complex graphical information in email. That’s because there is no HTML standard for email readers. So while web pages use HTML, and standards exist for the different web browsers to follow, each email reader does things it’s own way. If you send a complex graphical message from your email reader, it’s almost certain that some of your recipients are going to have a problem displaying the document properly.

One solution is to put your rich complex information up as a web page, and then send a plain text email with a link to this web page. All email readers will display links or URL’s as blue and clickable, even when it’s plain text.

You will want to show the full URL, including the http:// prefix. That is what tells the email readers to make that link blue and clickable.

Another advantage of having your information on a web site, is that Google and the other search engines can find it. So if you want people to know about and find this information, a web site is a better place than sending the information via email, because the search engines do not index email.

If you want to know how many people read your information, the logs on your web server are your most accurate resource. Just make sure that the only way people know about that link, is from the information in your email.

It used to be that you could track the open rate in HTML email, by inserting invisible graphics in the email, that would be downloaded from a web server. Counting the web log hits on that invisible graphic on the web server was a fairly accurate reflection of how many people read your email. But these days, almost all email readers block the images from loading when you open your email. While this helps prevent fraudulent attacks and showing misleading logos, it also means web tracking graphics are also blocked.

So sending a short email, with some teaser copy and the link to your web page, is frequently the best way to solve this problem.

A second solution is to create your complex graphical information in a document, and then send that document as an attachment. The PDF is probably the best type of document to create. Most computer users can already open and display a PDF document, and it will be displayed exactly as you created it.

The problem with sending attachments is that they frequently cause the email to be stopped by spam filters, and thus your subscribers never see your email. Attachments can become very large, which then gets blocked at many email gateways, as email was never designed to send large amounts of data.

Your content in an attachment is also more likely to be recognized as spam. That’s because the spam filters match up mathematical signatures from their database of known spam, to the signatures they compute from your email. The larger email now has many more chances to match up against one of the millions of known spam signatures.

mail-list.com has a third way of getting complex graphical information to your subscribers. We allow you to send attachments in your email, and we save that attachment on our server. We then alter your email to have a link to your attachment on our server, instead of the attachment itself. Now your email is short and concise, and people can click on the link to download your PDF or other document.

I don’t want to open up my email, and see large red capital letters in some garish font.

I don’t want to see pictures in my email. I don’t like the large file sizes when the pictures are bundled in the email. And when the HTML email contains links to the picture, I don’t like to wait while the graphics are loaded. If I want to see a picture, I will use my web browser, when I want to, and a plain text URL in your email will do just fine.

I don’t want people tracking whether I have opened up their email or not.

I don’t want advertising companies to grab my email address should I visit a site mentioned in the email.

I don’t want a virus to destroy my computer, or read my personal data files.

HTML email can allow all of the above to happen, while plain text email does not allow any of the above situations to occur.

Sending out HTML email to mailing lists causes additional problems. For starters, not all email readers can read HTML email. And even if their email reader can read HTML email, since there is no standard for HTML email, your HTML message may not look the same on their computer as it does on yours.

In addition, many of your subscribers are at ISP’s that have various and always changing spam filtering policies. Some of the criteria that these ISP’s use is the size of the message (HTML email is two to ten times the size of the same message in plain text, even without any graphics), and whether or not a HTML message is being received. You will find these filters show another advantage of plain text messages.

And if having their ISP filter your email wasn’t bad enough, many people are now installing anti-spam software on their own computer. Creating one more hurdle for your message to overcome.

There are trade offs between sending a visually stunning email, and having your message delivered and read by your subscriber. In general, the more visual effects you add, the higher the probability that your email will be stopped short of your reader’s brain.

If you have valuable information that you want to communicate to people, plain text email is best.

All lists at mail-list.com are set up to deliver plain text messages, even when a HTML message is sent. Our system will automatically convert any HTML message to plain text before delivery.

Many small businesses send out a monthly newsletter via email. Or at least they intend to.

Typically the email looks very nice, with 2 or 3 columns of text, multiple fonts, their logo and maybe the picture of the president. At least it looks good in most email readers, if and when the subscriber loads the images.

The newsletter contains a handful of articles and news items, but the problem is, nobody reads the newsletter. And it consumed a fair amount of resources to produce.

And the reason nobody reads the email, is it’s not an email.

It’s a web page disguised as an email.

Emails are short and to the point. In plain text, without any need for colors, fancy fonts, or pictures.

And emails are usually just one train of thought, and maybe a paragraph or three.

So when people are scanning their inbox, to see what to do with all the email that has accumulated, the fancy magazine style newsletter is easy to pass over, because it is going to take more than a few seconds to process. They might have an intention of reading it later, but later never comes. Too many more emails keep pouring in.

So if you want to capture your subscriber’s attention, send them an email, not a magazine. Keep it short and to the point. Send the news when it’s fresh, instead of waiting for a scheduled time to send something out. Just type up the news and send it to your list.

No need for fancy templates, graphic designers, or HTML email specialists to help you overcome the formatting limitations amongst the multitude of email readers.

Just you and your subscribers, heart to heart, with valuable information in short doses, that they will read and also read the next message you send out.

Because if you train them to ignore your emails, you can be sending out a ton of emails that are never read.

“Plain text email” means that only words are transmitted to the recipient, without any formatting information.

There can be no pictures, graphics, colors, different sized letters, or different types of fonts in a plain text email.

Plain text allows your subscribers to control the format of the email in their email readers, using the size and font that best suits their eyesight.

You can put web page addresses (URLs like http://www.mail-list.com) in plain text messages and these links will be clickable, allowing the recipient to immediately jump to the specified web page.

You can also put email addresses (like mailto:info@domain.com) in plain text messages, which, when clicked, open a draft email message with the “To” line already filled in.

Plain text email is easy to compose, easy to send, easy to receive. You don’t have to waste your time trying to format an email for a zillion different incompatible email readers.

Your subscribers can read your email even on their cell phones or PDAs, even if they have visual disabilities or need to use a text-to-speech converter.

Plain text emails have never, ever contained a virus, or tracked if or when an email message was opened, or caused any security problems. This means your subscribers can trust you.

Plain text emails are much more likely to get through all the spam filters on the Internet than HTML emails, which means they are much more likely to be read by your subscribers.

If you do have pictures, graphics, or precisely formatted information to share, the proper procedure is to put this information on a web page, either as the web page itself or as a downloadable link.

Then send a plain text email to your subscribers inviting them to visit this web page. With one click of the mouse, your subscribers can immediately jump to your web site. Providing this sort of link helps insure that the attachment does not trigger spam filters.

All mailing lists at mail-list.com are set up to deliver plain text messages, even when a HTML message is sent. Our system will automatically convert any HTML message to plain text before delivery.

Here at mail-list.com, we are dedicated to helping people communicate via Internet email. If you have valuable ideas and information you want to convey, plain text emails are best on today’s Internet.

To deliver “plain text email” into your subscriber’s inbox, please visit http://www.mail-list.com.

We all have people that reply to our newsletter to complain about something. Even though it’s free and you have good intentions.

Sometimes it can be useful constructive criticism.

Other times it’s psychopaths that want to take out all of their frustrations in life on you.

And reading these types of emails can be very unsettling, throwing you off balance for hours or even days. Even when you know that it should not be bothering you.

Next time that happens, just scroll down to the bottom of their reply, and find the unsubscribe link. Notice that their email address is embedded in the link.

Then click on that link, and a web page will appear asking you if you are sure you want to unsubscribe. Confirm with one more click, and that person will be taken off your list.

They will not get any sort of goodbye message.

And you won’t have to hear from that person ever again!

In 1990, Spam was canned precooked meat products, made by Hormel Foods Corporation.

In 2000, Spam was unsolicited bulk commercial email.

In 2010, Spam is any email that is not wanted. This includes the unsolicited bulk commercial email, which continues to be sent in record numbers.

And it also includes email that was originally asked for, but now is no longer welcome. Maybe their interests have changed, maybe your emails are boring, maybe they get too much email, etc.

Many web email providers, such as AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, have Report as Spam buttons, allowing their customers to designate any email as no longer wanted. These providers will relay that information back to the mailing list delivery service, asking them to take the person off of the list.

These providers also keep track of how many people reported a message as spam, versus how many emails were not. If the ratio of bad emails becomes too high, then future sending privileges may be reduced or revoked.