Forums and 'closed' mailing lists

In business, there is often a need to communicate quickly with large groups of recipients (e.g. an entire Membership list or a sales force) or some smaller sub-set of a group of recipients (e.g. just the 'research' Membership, or just the 'northern' sales force).

This can of course be done by 'phone or text but this presupposes that the various phone numbers and groups of 'phone numbers have been entered into a management system in some way - and that a system of record-keeping is also in place.

Often, a more practical solution is to use a 'closed' mailing list - sometimes called 'forums'  but never to be confused with 'mailing lists' in the general sense - with all their 'spam' connotations.

The forums are operated rather like communal mailboxes.  Anyone wishing to receive mail has to 'subscribe' to the mailbox - and anyone sending mail to the box has to be already 'subscribed'.  Anything sent to the mailbox is instantly received by all subscribers.  Subscribers can usually change their subscription options via a protected Web page.

The key advantage here is that individuals can subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) any particular list of interest and is never bombarded with irrelevant email.  Forums can be set up in a variety of ways - for example, with a 'moderator' or 'owner' who is able to control membership, vet messages before publication etc.  Usually, forums are set up so that any subscriber can email himself a list of other subscribers, list details and objectives etc. as he wishes.

These forums have the advantage of being largely self-policing.  Whenever a subscriber changes his email address, the onus is on him to re-subscribe under the new email address - rather than expect some distant clerk to telepathically maintain the list!  

Businesses wishing to set up Forums or closed mailing lists can use one of the commercial list services for a nominal fee per list.  If the business has a strong research an/or higher education bias, may have lists hosted for free (in the UK).  Often many inter-related lists are set up together with different subscription criteria for each and overlapping 'membership- avoiding the need to maintain comparable in-house lists of email addresses.  

Last modified: December 02, 2003