Mailing list is a great tool because it lets you send the same email message to any number of recipients at the same time. As you can imagine, this makes what would have been a massively laborious process a lot quicker and a lot easier.
To send an email to all of the addresses on your list, all you need to do is send it to the email reflector. This is a program that acts like a broadcaster, because it forwards your email to all of the names on the distribution list.
If you need to send identical notifications or newsletters to a lot of users, a mailing list will significantly cut down on the amount of time you need to spend on that job.
Mailing lists are largely automatic in what they do so there isn’t much user input required. Some mailing lists do give extra functionality though, like letting users subscribe, unsubscribe and modify their preferences.
Things like newsletters are treated as one-directional messages, but there are also things like discussion lists that can work both ways. These let subscribers contact each other, which is great because customers really appreciate extra features like this.
If you want to add features like these to your mailing list, try using one of the open source PHP mailing list management programs like phplist or poMMo. But do be careful when you set up your email marketing strategy. It’s all too easy to get things wrong and consign your messages to the SPAM folder.
with