Closed Membership Announcement Lists are restricted to the associates of an organization or group. The associates must have given the coordinators permission to send them email.
A simple and fast way to communicate with your group members
Membership Announcement Lists are closed to the general public, and typically the list owner puts the subscribers on the list, straight from their membership database. The confirmed opt-in process is not required.
If you can send an email message, you can operate our mailing list system. You can replace your entire list with one command via email, or you can add just new members with another email command. Our system will sort and remove any duplicate email addresses. Our system only stores the email address of your members, there is no need for any other personal data.
How the Costume Society Of America Keeps in communication with its members
The Costume Society of America brings together people in the academic world that are involved with costumes of all kinds. These members pay dues and can attend educational symposium and receive the annual printed publication – Dress.
And each month they receive the latest news via email. Since only members receive the emails, the group uploads the current list of email addresses prior to each issue. They send in one email, with the command REPLACELIST, followed by the entire list of email addresses. That deletes the old list of members, and puts in the new list.
Then they send out their e-newsletter to all current dues paying members.
In addition, they have told the system to send them reports of any subscribers that bounce off, so they can follow up with those members whose email addresses have gone bad.
So if you run a group where you keep the membership database, you can easily upload all the current member’s email address. Our system does not need any other information, so your data stays private.
How Writerl uses a membership announcement list like a Discussion Group
The WriterL list helps writers improve their craft of narrative non-fiction. They have gathered serious writers from around the world to discuss writing and help one another.
Membership is not free, unlike most other writing listserves on the Internet. And they publish a rooster of the members, along with a short biographical sketch. Which makes the group less anonymous and more polite, and as one member put it, “a welcome haven from the chaos of the net.”
All of the content is moderated by Jon and Lynn Franklin, and they aim for the civility, professionalism and mutual respect required to help each other out. Individual submissions are sent to the list owners, who then edit it down, and typically publish one email message per day. Since the list owners are the only ones who actually post a message, this list is set up like any other closed membership announcement list.
So if you have some expertise in an area, and want to help others learn, it is possible to run your own controlled discussion group, where you get to set the tone, and even get paid for some of your time.
When you are ready to send out an announcement, just compose your email like any other email. Put our secret address in the BCC field, and it will be delivered to everybody on your list.
How the Connecticut Marriage And Family Therapists gets MS Word, PDF’s and other attachments into their subscriber’s hands
The Connecticut Marriage and Family Therapists keeps their members up to date with a closed membership list. Sometimes plain text will do just fine, and sometimes they want to forward an existing flyer about an upcoming event. However, when they included attachments with their emails, some of the members never received the email. Attachments are a common reason why email is stopped for being spam.
So we created a system that saves the attachment on our server, and puts a link to the attachment at the top of the email. It also notes the size of the attachment, so the members can judge how long it will take to download. The links are blue and click-able when the small message arrives in the subscriber’s inbox.
This link will be blue and click-able in the emails you send out.
We can do the same thing for your list, if you need to get Word documents, PDF’s, spreadsheets, photos and other attachments safely into your subscribers hands.
Did they get and read your email?
Here’s an easy way to take votes online, or verify that everybody has read your email about an important announcement. When you send your email, put this special phrase -
rollcall-link-here
in your email. That special phrase will be expanded into a unique link for each subscriber. Like this -
http://www.mail-list.com/?ln=listserve&nm=joe@xyz.com
This link will be blue and click-able in the emails you send out. mail-list® will then record those clicks, and send you a report showing who has responded. Then if necessary, you can try a private email or telephone call to reach those members that did not see your message.
Keeping track of members leaving your list
You can send in an email command to see if anybody has un-subscribed or bounced off your list. Addresses will bounce off after a few emails are returned by their ISP with an error message. Like the mailbox was full, or that address is no longer active.
You can also tell the system to send you these reports on a weekly basis, so you can keep your membership database in sync with your mailing list.
Sometimes your member’s ISP will have technical problems, causing their email to bounce or otherwise not be delivered. You will have commands to see the delivery logs to the subscriber’s ISP, and see any bounce messages coming back from the subscriber’s ISP. If and when this type of problem happens, it is usually a good time to ask for some technical expertise from the people at mail-list®.
