[WEB4LIB] free egroups service

[Lee Jaffe]

I maintain a mailing list which started with eGroups and am
suffering through the transition to Yahoo Groups.  The problem
is only in part the differences between the two systems and
how these affected existing list members.  There is a Yahoo way
of doing things (and if you know anything of the origins of that
name, you'll understand what I mean) and forcing the eGroups
features to fit within that view has been painful.  Members had
set up profiles -- all gone now -- and the system was working
well under eGroups.   The Yahoo way has eliminated many of
the better features and presented little advantage in return.  I
joined a merger discussion list in order to have a resource for
managing these changes but no real help has been forthcoming.
Even new accounts are having problems.  People report to me
that they've attempted to subscribe to my list but have been
notified that the owner hasn't approved their request but I haven't
seen anything appear in the queue.  I've spent much more time
dealing with technical problems of managing the list since the
conversion than I did under eGroups.  Yahoo really blew it.
I would love to find an alternative service and just move my whole
list there.  I tried myfamily.com but others considered it too
littered with ads and too cumbersome to use.  I'm going to look
into coollist and welcome any suggestions others offer.

-- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz

p.s. Within our worksite, we use an application called mailman
for managing in-house mailing lists and it works very well.

At 3:55 AM -0800 3/14/01, Francesco Giacanelli wrote:
>Dear Web4libbers,
>
>about 1 year ago, I posted the same msg about creating an e-group with free
>service on the net. At that time, I did not need to create such service any
>more, but now I am involved again in creating one of this.
>This group will have about 30 members and must be restricted.
>
>I knew that "Egroups" was one of the most reliable free service, but now it
>has merged into Yahoo! Any of you has had experiences with this new service?
>Any suggestions about other similar services (I knew Coollist, which seems
>at a first sight simple to use. www.coollist.com)?.
>
>I will appreciate any suggestion regarding reliability, easy of use, etc.
>
>Thanks very much in advance
>Regards
>Francesco Giacanelli, Rome, Italy