This weekend I was busy all weekend showing off the site I took over several months ago. Since I got it I went to town rewriting pages once to get rid of crud behind the scenes, once to increase functionality by adding menus, a better layout, and a touch of Ajax. Finally I moved the whole thing to WordPress set up as a CMS. Things were looking good. I got a lot of credit and some good suggestions for where to go in the future (along with, as one might imagine, some “other” suggestions).
The site supports about forty users any of whom might want changes, files added, statements updated, that sort of thing. Mostly they don’t want much so it’s not a big job keeping things up to date. The biggest problem we have is email. All forty folks have an email account on the domain, all are encouraged to use it and, frankly, it’s kind of a pain.
You see the host they chose, Netfirms, is a little bit tight when it comes to email. I don’t think forty people is a huge number, but we can’t address email to every member of the group. We have to send out the same email in blocks of ten addresses which, as you might images, is kind of a pain for the secretary of the group as well as anyone else trying to sent out notices.
Having had some experience with two way mailing lists over the years I decided this might be a great solution. I gave some thought to using forum software like phpBB or bbPress from the same folks who came up with WordPress but since I have a hard enough time getting folks to even check their email I decided that a full fledged forum might not be feasible at this time. If we send them a file and it shows up in their inbox they might actually use it, but if they have to log in on a forum, make sure they navigate to the right discussion, well…never mind.
So I took a look at the software I remembered for setting a two way mailing list, Listserv, majordomo, Listproc, Smartmail, GNU Mailman, etc. I figured this was a perfect solution for the problem. I’d create a closed list that only accepted mail from one of the forty and then passed on to the other thirty-nine. I finally found something that was free, would run on the host without too much trouble, and seemed easy enough to set up and manage that the next webmaster won’t be overwhelmed, Dada Mail.
In it’s native state Dada is a basically a one way mailer, but has a plugin to allow it go in both directions. It’s lightweight, configurable, easy to manage, and seemed like something I could throw up quickly.
Speaking of throwing up…
I’d noticed a week or two ago that I couldn’t get WordPress on Netfirms to allow me to add a blog entry by email. It failed to connect every time. I have no problems here at Statrix (AN Hosting) but didn’t give it much more thought because it’s not something I particularly care to do. Therein lies the rub.
To blog by mail, something somewhere has to check the mail, retrieve the posts, and generally do the behind the scenes work. The failure on Netfirms should have tipped me off about a future mailing list, but I’m going to plead stupidity. The reason WP failed is because Netfirms will not allow programs or scripts on their host to access mail accounts for security reasons. They will allow to send lots and lots of mail from a script using their sendmail, but I can’t check the incoming mail from the account itself. That’s why WP failed and why Dada wouldn’t work either. Both require the ability to check an inbox, grab the mail, and do something with it – WP puts in the blog, Dada redistributes.
Darn! That pretty much puts a crimp in my style. No two way mailing list on Netfirms.
Ultimately much choices seem to boil down to…
1. Use Dada as a one way list and teach everyone to use the web interface to send mail to everyone on the list. I hate this idea. As I said, my users have enough trouble being convinced to check their email, this just adds needless complexity to their lives. Sending email to “everyone@xxx.xxx” isn’t a problem, but using yet another interface to do so is.
2. Set up a Google or Yahoo group. I’m pretty sure I could use these as mailers for the group, provided everyone opts in, everyone makes sure they set their status to receive each bit of mail, and no one minds that the domain we pay for has nothing to do with it. This isn’t going to fly either I suspect.
3. Set up the mailing list bit on another server that can check mail (like AN Hosting) and have it do the work. I could even redirect the “everyone@xxx.xxx” mail to “everyone@yyy.yyy” so folks wouldn’t have to remember extra domain names. The problem with this is that now we are paying for two hosts or we have to use my account which isn’t a problem, at least until I rotate out of service and pass along the job. That is going to happen. Period. So…no go, at least not in the long term though in the short term I’m at least going to verify it works.
4. Move to a different host. I love and hate this idea. I love it because it would allow me to put all my eggs in one basket on a host that works and does what I want. I hate it because it would mean moving all those email accounts to another system that probably doesn’t have the same webmail interface. At least the domain would remain the same, but training everyone to use a different webmailer when they already seem reluctant to use the one they have…well…it’s going to be a problem no matter what.
The moral of this story is, when you decide to pick a host, find out what they can do, what they allow, and what they don’t.
Aloha!
Slower, cheaper, less useful…