Newsletters with a PDf attached

[Dab]

Hi,

Our client wants to send a monthly newsletter out to their 300 members. The newsletter will probably be in a pdf format, as it contains photos, forms and other items that preclude the usual type of email list newsletter.

Is there any kind of service that handles this sort of thing? Is there a better way than sending from someone's Outlook Express addressbook on their local machine and sending each one of their 300 members an email with an attachment with a pdf full of graphics etc?

Not sure of what's available or how to handle this one. Would appreciate any help here.

Dab

[jason]

Set up a mailing list in the control panel. For a broadcast type of list, I would disable posting except for messages from the people who work for the company that wants to send the message out so taht others can't send anything out to the rest of the list.

Once you ahve the list setup, all you need to do is send an email to listname@domain.com and it will be delivered to every subscriber.

I have some friends that do this for their companies newsletter (they just send an email, no attachments), and it works great for them. I'm a scout leader and I just recently set up lists for the staff, parents, and scouts in the troop so that we can get messages out quickly and easily. We used to all have our own lists of addresses that we each maintained and we'd include each recipient in the To: field of the message. Now its just one (or two or three, depending on who we're sending stuff to) email addresses, everyone gets it, and no one has to worry about having an out of date list of addresses.

--Jason

[Dab]

Thanks, Jason, for your help.

Actually, our client doesn't have a web site of their own and don't seem to want one; we publish a monthly newsletter for them and they want to now send it via email (save trees). I was wondering what sort of outside free it is a voluntary organization), or charged services are available to do this.

They may have to take up your suggestion and pay for a web site so that they can send their emails!

Thanks again. Any suggestions appreciated.

Dab

[jason]

Well, I host a couple of mailing lists on my site or others (the scout troop ones I mentioned before). We have our own domain name for the troop, but the company we host with doesn't have mailing list software available (we get the space free, so I'm not complaining). I set up the lists and my server. Since only one of them is an active discussion list (among the leaders) and the others are just for infrequent announcements, they take up very little of my bandwidth.

You could host this groups list in this manner on your domain if you wanted to. I don't know how it would effect your bandwidth because I don't know the size of the list or how big the PDF's will be, but you could give the admins full access to the list management interface online, so you could create the list and not have to worry about it.

Yahoo also has a mailing list service. I think it may have been absorbed into their groups sevice. One of the clubs that I've involve with at the school where I work uses it. I think what yahoo offers is more of a discussion list than an announcement list, meaning that any subscriber can send messages to the whole list. I've never see the administrative options available, though, so I don't know if that can be disabled or not. All of the yahoo messages will be tagged with an ad. I don't know if they allow messages or not.

There may be other services out there. Try searching for "free mailing list" or something like that. I'd suspec that any free service will include advertising and may impose limits on wht you can send or how many people you send to, so check them out closesly.

--Jason

[Dab]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for your help here and for your suggestions. I'll follow them up. I appreciate you taking the time out to assist.

Dab