Bringing mailing lists to the masses

We'll make running your list easier, new companies say -- just take our ads.

By Janelle Brown

Mar 25, 1999 | "One's mailbox is one's real portal -- e-mail is still the killer app." So says Craig Newmark, and he should know: As the soft-spoken proprietor (or "list owner" or "list mom") of Craig's List, he serves up e-mail daily to 7,600 subscribers on 17 mailing lists about the San Francisco Bay Area.

Where words like "portal" and "killer app" swarm, companies with business plans are rarely far behind. So it should not be surprising to discover that a host of new firms are looking to commercialize your in box -- to put ads on your e-mail and introduce direct marketing into your mailing lists and e-mail communities.

A number of fledgling startups, such as Topica, Onelist and eGroups are working to harness the power of mailing lists -- enabling marketers to insert their ads into even the smallest mailing-list communities. At the same time, these companies are working from a benevolent belief that they can enable community-building with easy-to-use tools that allow even the newest of newbies to become a "list mom." Let a thousand ad-riddled communities bloom!

"Mailing lists were one of the last areas that hadn't been exploited -- though I'm sure there are other areas that we haven't thought of yet, and marketers will soon flock there too," says Scott Paterson, senior partner at the eScribe mailing list archiving service. "There's potential for a lot more growth, and a lot of interest in direct advertising."

Mailing lists are one of the Internet's oldest communications methods, and one of the most simple -- all you need is a collection of e-mail addresses united by a common purpose and one forwarding address. A mailing list can be the weekly newsletter that CNET sends out to half a million readers -- or just a group of five or 10 relatives who keep up via e-mail. The number of mailing lists online is generally estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, sending millions upon millions of e-mails flying through the ether every day.

But despite their online ubiquity, mailing lists have typically been plagued by technical hurdles. Mailing list programs like majordomo or listserv required potential list operators to learn a series of arcane e-mail-based commands and to set up a server to run the list. As Mark Fletcher, CEO of Onelist, puts it, "If you wanted to run a mailing list, you had to be a nerd."

Getting members on and off the list could be equally difficult. And to top it all off, you had to know where to find those mailing lists in the first place -- a daunting task, since the best mailing lists were scattered across the Net and were rarely listed in directories. Even the mailing list software that did attempt a Web-based interface, such as Lyris, was too expensive or technically advanced for average people.

Enter Onelist, eGroups, Topica and a host of smaller mailing list services (often called listhosts) that have launched in the last year. Each of these startup companies offers comparable services: free mailing list tools and hosting in a Web interface, enabling just about anyone to set up a community-cum-mailing list in the space of just a few minutes, along with enormous directories of mailing lists you can join.

Month-old Topica, for example, allows members to set up and monitor their mailing lists through a series of easy Web-based tools. List owners can determine whether their new communities will be moderated or archived, can remove individual list members with the click of a button, create headers and footers, and so on. You can even import an already existing mailing list into the Topica service. List members, in turn, can find and track mailing lists via the Topica Web site, search mailing list archives and easily get on and off new lists. Think of it as a Dejanews or Hotmail-type service for mailing lists.

Next Page: Are targeted ads a service or a pain?

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