What is a Mailing List?
Good question because this means many things to many people/ companies. All mailing lists center around having a list of emails that an administrator can send emails out to whenever they choose. This list of emails can be much larger than what AOL and other hosts will allow to send out. Also mailing list programs allow the recipient to sign up and delete their email from the mailing list by themselves -- that's right, you/the administrator doesn't have to do it!
How to Create a Mailing List
Okay, the obvious easy beginner way is with Yahoo Groups. This is the perfect way to begin if you do not have much computer skills. Learn how.
Unfortunately Yahoo Email Groups are ad-supported and too tacky for a larger website/group. Also it don't track how many people opened the email or clicked on a link inside it. Also, it doesn't allow beautiful images with standards-based formatting. If you have LunarPages web hosting, or any decent host that supports CGI Scripts or has MySQL database and PHP hosting, then you want to use one of these more sophisticated, but more complicated, programs.
DaDa Mail
DaDa Mail is pretty easy to setup because you only have to customize a CGI script, not databases or other PHP-related settings. And it is free! Don't know what CGI scripting is? Get a friend to help you unless you are very comfortable trying new things. Or pay them the very reasonable $75 installation fee (http://mojo.skazat.com).
There is a small notice on the bottom "powered by DaDa Mail." You can buy the "professional version" to take this off (http://mojo.skazat.com) $50 as is. $100 with installation.
This wonderful program tracks "open rates"-- how many people opened the email you sent. And "click throughs" -- your email should contain 2 - 6 stories with 2 or 3 sentence summaries to grab people's attention that then has a link "read more" that directs them to the entire story on your website-- this link is a "click through." Knowing "click through" rates are invaluable in learning what your web audience is interested in and what information they seek. (And eventually, put up a form on your stories and ask them what they think and what more they want to learn.)
PHP List
Many people's favorite email management program is PHP List, especially if they like PHP. If you do not know any PHP, don't do this yourself, get a friend who does.
Go to http://tincan.co.uk/phplist. Read the short first page and click the link "check out the specifics" so you understand all the different features of this program. Great, huh?! And free!
Then download the program. It is compressed to allow for faster download. Double-click on the downloaded file and uncompress it. Then open up the folder and double-click on "install" to install it. Follow their install instructions. Sorry, I don't know PHP yet and can't help with this one.
Constant Contact
Not very techie and have a few dollars to pay someone to do your mailing list for you? Many not-for-profits choose Constant Contact as their first full-featured email management program. You can use their web page to import and export email addresses, easily track open rates for each email sent out, check click through rates, and easily create email newsletters that won't be blocked by your client's spam filters. Constant Contact also can generate a "send to a friend" feature on your website to make it easy for a site visitor to email your website to a friend. Special discounts for nonprofits.