FREE EMAILING SERVICES AND PASSWORDS
by Bob McElwain

Shortly after starting my first email newsletter, the list
grew beyond a hundred names. I found I was spending far too much
time adding and deleting subscribers. And the bounces were tough
to handle. (A bounce is an email that is returned as
undeliverable.) There are a lot of valid reasons for bounces,
such as a mailbox being full, so one can not assume an address
that bounced is no longer good. For example, AOL choked one day
and sent back some thirty copies of the newsletter!

I never did figure a best-way to deal with bounces. What I
settled for was resending the following day with the subject as
Second Try. Note this list was subscribed to by a lot of young
people and curiosity seekers, so there were lots of changes and
lots of bounces from addresses canceled.

When I heard about ListBot, I checked. It is part of the
LinkExchange operation, now owned by MSN. I read all the info
available with a good deal of care. I liked the way in which
they dealt with bounces. (Translate: I would not have to do so.
) So I signed up. I passed on free and took the Gold option
for $79/year because the size of my newsletter and frequency of
mailing made it practical to do so. I put their nice form up on
my site pages, and lots of visitors subscribed easily by typing
in their email address.

But a problem arose immediately. It stemmed from ListBot's
demand that subscribers enter a password to unsubscribe. Sounds
like a good idea, doesn't it? It backfired on me in two ways.

First, they send a subscriber his or her forgotten password
by auto-responder, which usually arrives in less than a minute.
But this didn't work with AOL subscribers. At least at that
time, email to AOL was commonly delayed several hours. Impatient
subscribers wrote not-nice notes demanding I solve the problem.
I did not like the notes. And it would have been easier to deal
with them on my own system, than to trot off to ListBot.

Second, a lot of my subscribers used email addresses
connected to the firm at which they worked. When an employee
left the company, I got email demanding removal, for of course
they could not know what the password was. Unfortunately, it
often required waiting for another newsletter in order to find
the correct email address.

On one such occasion, I got an angry call from a fellow who
claimed to be the owner of a company. He demanded I simply
search on his company URL. While still on the phone, I checked
my parallel list and got nine hits. I explained I did not know
which one to delete.

He flat wigged out and demanded I delete them all! No way
were his employees going to waste their time and his resources.
His vocabulary was colorful and there was much talk of law suits.
A real fun time.

Not much later, I gave up on ListBot. The password bit had
proved to be a killer. If I could have figured a way around this
problem, I would still be using their service, for it was
excellent in all other respects. Instead, I went back to dealing
with them myself and grit my teeth regards the time it was taking
to maintain my list. Again, this was a list that changed
frequently. With a more stable list such as the one for "STAT
News," this is not much of a problem for there are few
unsubscribes and even fewer bad addresses.

About a month later, I read a terrific article: "Review Of
Free Mailing List Programs" by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson,
http://www.wilsonweb.com He identified four free emailing
services and put all through some very thorough tests. They were
...
eGROUPS http://www.egroups.com
ONEList http://www.onelist.com
TOPICA http://www.topica.com
LISTBOT http://www.listbot.com

Wilson's basic interest seemed to lie in open and moderated
discussion lists, but his comments apply as well to a newsletter
such as "STAT News" (an announcement list). If you need further
information, be sure to read his article. The following is a
link to an excellent table comparing these four services.
http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/list-compare.htm>. From this
page, you can click back to the article itself.

As Wilson points out, none of them are truly free, for they
add an advertisement to the bottom of each copy of your
newsletter. At present, Topica has an option to omit it, but
this will change. ListBot has not implemented it as yet, but is
expected to do so soon. In any case, for $60-$80 a year, you can
buy ad-free service.

The few things Wilson found as flaws were of no concern to
me. And my list was still growing, taking ever greater chunks of
time. So I checked, then rechecked. All appeared to solve the
bounce problem well enough. All archive your newsletter. I was
ready to try one. Then I found it required a password. Upon a
closer look, all required one.

This led to a second problem. I wrote to each asking if the
password field could be omitted. The answer was no, which was
not surprising, for ListBot had already told me this. What was
surprising was that it took several days to get a reply. The
answers to follow up questions were also slow in coming.

Bottom Line: I like the support from ListBot. And when you
are just getting started, you need lots of help. ListBot was
excellent in this regard. If you do not feel passwords will be a
problem for you, I recommend ListBot. However, I'm sure the
other services do an excellent job. Reading Wilson's article
will likely bring you to the same conclusion.
________________________________________________________

Bob McElwain
Web marketing and consulting since 1993
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