Mailing Lists

 

Keep your Customers Up-to-Date

Sooner or later everyone wants to send a given message to lots of users. Level7 provides the tools you need to set up mailing lists so that you don’t need to send your message multiple times or put everyone’s address in the message header.

A mailing list is an email address which gets handled in a special way by our mailserver: rather than being forwarded to a single destination, the mailing list address is expanded into all the addresses in the mailing list (sometimes called subscribers) and every address in the list receives a copy of the message. This can be a great time-saver if your list is big but your connection to the Internet is relatively slow or overloaded, because you only need to send one copy of your message across that link.

Our mailing list software lets you setup and manage mailing lists so that keeping in touch with your customers, members or social group is as easy as possible.  Mailing lists can be as simple as a file of addresses that you supply to us, or as complicated as a dynamic database search which lets you target your message to only those people who have registered a relevant interest.

Please note that Level7 does not condone the use of mailing lists for the sending of unsolicited bulk email (spam) and if we find our service being abused in such a fashion we will take action accordingly. See our Terms and Conditions for further information.

Lists for Businesses

A mailing list is the ideal way for businesses to communicate with their customers.  A properly set up list can have several advantages:

• You supply the customers' addresses only once, you don't need to type them all in every time you send a message
• All your customer's addresses are kept private
• You decide who can send messages to your list
• Customers will know the message is an official communication from your business.

Our centrally-managed mailing list facility solves problems commonly faced by clubs and societies.  Does your organisation have a single volunteer whose job it is to send out information?  What happens if that member is unable to send email?  You might try to avoid this problem by assigning this job to 2 or 3 members — but then how do they make sure they each have identical copies of your mailing list(s)?

Having your mailing lists hosted by Level 7 gives you the best solution.  You can specify which members can send to your list(s), and what to do with messages that aren't from one of the "permitted" senders.  (Those people who are authorised to send to your lists are often known as moderators.)

Once your centrally-held mailing lists are up and running you can consider solving another problem. Any club or society with more than a couple of dozen members is likely to have sub-groups with different interests, all covered by your organisation's charter but perhaps not all interesting to every other member.  A set of database-driven mailing lists is the solution to allow your members to communicate with like-minded members without involving the entire society, and without having to maintain a separate mailing list file for every special interest group.

Simple Lists

The simplest type of list is a text file containing the addresses you’d like your message sent to. Such a list is easily maintained using any text editor (e.g. Notepad on a PC, Textedit on a Mac) which you can transfer to our mail server using FTP (see this Helpdesk Page). Or we can set it up for you (a service fee may be charged if frequent changes are required).

Dynamic Lists

When you have a large number of entries in your mailing lists and you frequently need to move addresses from one list to another, or need to add and remove multiple addresses from multiple lists, our LDAP Directory list service will be of interest.

The LDAP Directory contains details on all the people you’re likely to send email to. For example, it could be the members of your Club or Society. As such, each member will have specific interests which correspond to different mailing lists.

Instead of maintaining a separate distribution list file for each special group of members (e.g. a separate file for each team in your sporting club), you record against each member’s entry in the LDAP directory the specific interests of that member. We configure your mailing lists on the Level7 mailserver to search the LDAP directory for members with interests corresponding to the lists. So if you had a list called ‘senior.players@sportsclub.org.au’ the mail server will search the LDAP directory for all members who have the “senior player” attribute and send them the message.

If you choose the LDAP Directory service we will discuss with you the best way to perform updates to the LDAP Directory.