Sending Mail to Groups

There are several ways of sending mail to groups of readers. Included here is an overview of those methods, including Andrew mailing lists, massmail, distribution lists and shared address books. To help you choose the method most applicable to your situation, the major attributes of and pointers to more information are included.

Andrew Mailman

• readers can join or cancel their "membership" to the list
• provides a method of easily communicating with any group of people (as few as a dozen or as many as hundreds) who share a common interest
• maintains the e-mail addresses of the group
  
• mailing lists are managed by list owners
  
• list owners are responsible for configuring and maintaining the list

Massmail

• used to send individual mail messages to greater than one hundred users. This is in contrast to dlists (described below) which are used to send mail to smaller groups used in conjuction with mail merge programs to generate formatted mass mailings to groups of users

Distribution lists (dlists)

• used for sporadic or one time mailings, ideally to groups less than 100 users
  
• created by placing a list of mail recipients in a file called "distribution list" 
• readers cannot join or cancel from the list themselves