Need recommendations for an announcement list

apps
#1

My dog club is on a basic “insane domain” account. We need an announcement list that selected people (club officers, trainers, etc) can send news with. There could be up to about 175-200 members who’d be getting these announcements.

The announcement list offered with the account can only be used if I give out the main password to the control panel. And I’m not going to do that since I hardly know half of them. And I can’t figure out a way to modify the mailman discussion list to do what I need.

I don’t know enough to write my own basic php or cgi script to do this securely. There’s a few scripts over at source forge that might do it, they’re hard to find (buried with grocery lists and ipod lists) and there’s not much info on the ones I’ve found.

Any suggestions that will work well on a Crazy Insane Domain?

-LM

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read. -Groucho Marx

#2

GoDaddy has an announcement service that I bought to experiment with, but haven’t actually had the time to yet. It looks like it would get the job done and satisfies DH’s spam requirements.

It’s not free, but it’s cheap. Check it out and see what you think.

Good luck!

#3

Thank you!! You got me going to check what exactly DH’s spam requirements are! I didn’t even think of that, since I had planned on finding a “safe” script to begin with. Didn’t occur to me that they had particular requirements too, it’s usually only the email recipient ISP’s I’ve had to worry about before.

While looking around, I discovered the 200/hr email limit if I don’t use DH’s scripts. Hmmmm, that could be a big problem. But they’ll waiver or change that limit if the script fits certain requirements.

But it turns out I didn’t need a new script anyway.

They don’t mention this anywhere I looked, I got this info through a support ticket, but you can give others limited access to use the DH announcement list by creating a sub-user through c-panel and giving them only “mailing list” access. It’s not perfect since it does seem to allow them to order a new domain if they poke around enough and deliberately want to cause trouble. Whether they can complete such an order or not, I don’t know, I didn’t try it. But it’s better than giving someone full access to my existing account to cause accidental trouble hitting the wrong button, etc. Those are who I’m more worried about.

But this doesn’t seem to give them access to mailing lists already created, only to lists created AFTER the sub-user is created. For instance I already had a discussion list built, but the sub-users can’t access it through their limited c-panel. Which is fine with me actually , I want a tighter rein on the discussion list anyway. But that might not be fine for everyone.

So I got the DH announcement list basics working under a sub-user, and I now just have to finish the webpages for it all.

Thank you again!!

-LM

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read. -Groucho Marx

#4

Yeah, you can create other user accounts and grant them privileges, but it’s not a perfect system.

Unless you’re sending a plaintext message to your list, the people posting for your have to be able to do the message in HTML, which is above a lot of peoples’ heads.

Check out the Suggestions area in your web panel. If you run the filter for just Mail > Announce Lists, you’ll see a bunch of things you can vote on and hopefully Dreamhost will implement one or more of them in the future. I really like the idea of authorized users being able to post to the list by mailing to a special email address or storing templates. There’s also one to make a “announcements.domain.com” site similar to “mailboxes.domain.com” where end-users can fully manage an announcement list. Wouldn’t that be great?!

Good luck!

#5

I am limiting them to just plain text, anyway, it should be fine for what we’re doing. Plus I don’t want to go anywhere near there trying to teach them html. So, hopefully the new user account will work out, we’ll see!!

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read. -Groucho Marx