by Peter Cooper

Price: Free ad-supported service with a $99 per year Gold option.
Availability: Anyone, unless you plan to distribute illegal or pornographic material.

Whenever you try to become a member of an online community, or even just download a piece of software, you're often asked to join a mailing list. Most people agree to be added to these lists and receive product updates, news about the industry or other information. Mailing lists provide an excellent way for you to communicate with your visitors, customers, staff, or even your family.

Mailing lists can be a great way of ensuring loyalty among your visitors, since a regular e-mail will remind them to visit your site. For example, if you're running an eCommerce site, you could send out a list of special offers exclusive to list members each month. If you manage a content site, you can link to the latest articles and features on your site, and as long as you don't bombard your visitors with constant e-mails, they'll be happy to receive updates.

ListBot.com offers a unique two-tier service that gives you an easy way to create and maintain a mailing list. You can create either a regular announcement mailing list which only you can post to, or a discussion mailing list where all of your subscribers can e-mail one another and discuss various topics. The latter might be a good option with a group of friends or family, but in most cases an announcement list will be best. You're given this option when signing up with ListBot.

So how does ListBot really shape up?

Signing Up and Installing

When you go to ListBot's home page you have to choose which system you want to use, either ListBot Gold or ListBot Free, as described below:

• ListBot Gold - ListBot Gold is the cream of the ListBot service. You have complete control over your subscriber list and what appears in the messages you send. You can even create your own demographic questions to be asked when people sign up to your list. Right now (September 2000), this service is $99 per year, and is the best option for commercial entities who don't want ListBot's advertisements to appear in their e-mails.
• ListBot Free - The free ListBot service. You get all of the basic services and people can sign up to your mailing list and you can send messages out to them. One condition of the free service is that ListBot has the right to place advertising at the end of your messages. For most non-profit organizations and small businesses, however, this won't be a problem. Another condition of the free service is that you don't have the ability to import existing e-mail lists into the system, which means if you have an existing list of subscribers or customers, you will have to type them in and invite them all by hand.

Once you've selected which system you want to use (you can upgrade later on if you wish), you can begin the the signup process. ListBot wants to know your name, address, e-mail address, URL and a desired log in name and password. Thankfully the process is easy and the most taxing questions you're asked are which demographic details you want to obtain from your subscribers when they join. The best idea is to leave these set at the defaults, since your visitors might not want to answer your questions, and it's better to gain a subscriber than lose one, isn't it?

The signup process is complete when you're given the HTML code to copy and paste into your site which allows visitors to sign up to your mailing list. You can copy and paste this code immediately, but if you don't want to then you can retrieve it at any time from your List Owner Control Center. Of course, if you really want your list to remain private, just ignore the HTML code, and invite people by hand instead.

Getting Started with Your List

The List Owner Control Center isn't the easiest Web based application you'll ever use, but with a little experimentation it proves to be most usable. All of the features you'll need are available from the main screen, such as inviting members, checking out your list, creating a new list, editing your list's properties and sending a message to your list.

Sending a message to your list is very simple, just select 'Send a Message', enter the subject of your mail, and enter the body of text into the appropriate box. ListBot only allows you to send messages up to 100kb (kilobytes) long, but this is enough for even the heartiest of documents. If you want to send something larger, you'll need to split it up into multiple sections.

You're also given the option to place the message into the public archive which allows interested parties to read the archives of your mailing list. If the information isn't time-sensitive or personal then this won't matter much. This can prove to be a useful function since it allows you to look back over old mailings, and new subscribers might wish to see what's been posted before and get a feel for your list.

Conclusion

For a free mailing list service, ListBot proves hard to beat. Most of the features you could ever want are offered for free, and those which you may desire (such as the ability to import an existing list of e-mail addresses) are offered in the inexpensive Gold version.

The system isn't as easy to use as it could be, but most intermediate users won't have a single problem in signing up and using the service. You can't cause any damage by signing up, so even a newcomer to the Internet could handle it, although they might not understand all of the terminology that ListBot uses. Finally, if you use ListBot responsibly (no pornography, of course) you'll find yourself having a lot of fun trying to get people to subscribe to your list, and if you're dealing in e-commerce, picking the fruits of your labors in extended customer loyalty.

ListBot gives you absolutely no excuse to be without a mailing list. Just dive in, and enjoy getting in touch with all of your family, customers or friends in just a few clicks. You'll never look back!