I’m finishing up a website design for a musician friend of mine, and someone has suggested to her that at the very least she needs to have a mailing list sign-up on her site.
But it seems to me that they have been superseded by newer technologies, not least of which is RSS on blog updates.
Are mailing lists still popular? I’m sure there are some still some long term lists that still get posts, but I wonder do new lists still spring up, and is it an expected default feature on certain kinds of sites?
Collecting email addresses for one-way mass mailing is still very important for marketing, even if it’s just a fan site. Are you sure that’s not what she meant?
Two-way lists are still used, but not sure how useful they are with blogs and message boards. They can actually control spam better IMHO but don’t have the same “instant gratification” of blog comments.
I assumed the OP meant LISTSERV / MAJORDOMO type mailing lists, the kind where you autosubscribe and then get sent a DIGEST issue every x days containing everyone’s contributions; the digest is sent to something like Digest-Recipients@somedomain.org and that is an alias to everyone’s individual email addy; you’d get the digest but not see everyone else’s email; Reply-To would go to Submissions@somedomain.org and would be included in the next digest, etc.
Mostly dead because of the following factors:
a) They used blind carbon copy to “explode” the To header alias to all the currently registered recipients. BCC was so abused by spammers from around 1998 onwards that lots of ISPs dumped digests thinking the extensive BCC list meant it was spam.
b) uBB, vB, ProBoards, etc etc web-based bulletin boards have largely replaced their functionality; you can see replies more or less in real-time instead of waiting for the next day. You can format the text. You can (on some boards) insert images or attach file attachments.
c) In a more general way, people have just drifted away from email. It was once THE ubiquitous rapid-content-delivery system. Nowadays between cellphone texting and instant messaging and web-based message boards and blogs and twittering and whatnot, it’s lost that patina. It sure as heck isn’t new and exciting.
That was my thinking, which is why I was discouraging it, but if it is, as ZipperJJ suggested, a uni-directional “News Update” kind of deal, then maybe there’s more of a use for it.
I am still doubtful, though. I think RSS would cover that concept much better.
Given the amount of newsletter type updates I get by email from companies I’ve once bought something from (or shown a vague interest in, or somehow given them my email address and forgotten to uncheck the box), I’d say the concept of an opt-in mailing list is still a popular one. And some of them, I actually like getting - information on when they’re having sales, or when new products are available or things like that.
If that’s the sort of thing she wanted, I could see it being a good idea - though I’m not sure many people will volunteer to receive it. Maybe musicians have a better product for this kind of thing though - new tour dates, or CDs or songs being released as an MP3 or whatever. Could work well in a newsletter.
I’m still on a couple mailing lists to keep myself current in the field of paleontology. It actually accounts for the majority of the e-mail I receive. I haven’t had to learn what “RSS” is yet.
Big mail lists don’t work very well anymore. If the mail list is of any size it becomes likely that enough recipients at gmail will mark it as spam and gmail will toss subsequent mailings. The same goes for yahoo hotmail etc.
I belong to several professional listservs. They’re very useful in getting answers to technical problems. Not only can I ask a question and get answers, but I can also search the archives to see if anyone else has seen the same problem. Considering how hard it is to get good technical help from vendors these days, the listservs have been a Godsend.
I just create rules so they go into their own folders and don’t clog my inbox, but in the education and technical fields, they are doing quite well.
Having said that, I realised I get email updates from some sites. Adobe and Newtek send me stuff once or twice a month, and a couple of forums I’m a part of have new updates they send out. But it’s a part of the “sign up to comment” procedure (voluntary opt-in), rather than a separate feature.
I think mailing list for academic API/SDK as well as certain development tools are still rather active. I am flooded by the Nokia Qt development mailing list, for instance, everyday. And I am subscribing to it in digest mode!
My husband and I run a mailing list for bilingual families. We haven’t had any problems with our members on gmail, hotmail, and so on receiving their mail. Actually the problem is the other way 'round - because of problems with viruses getting sent back and forth a few years ago, we have the list set to only accept plain text messages, and several of the popular web-based email readers send HTML messages by default.
Just as the SDMB hive mind looks down on most other message boards as being intellectually inferior, I’ve found that those who frequent mailing lists (or, as they often call them, listservs) look down on just the idea of message boards.
Mailing lists are still immensely popular among urban planners in the US, for some reason. There’s even elite lists, such as PRO-URB, that are frequented by celebrities in the New Urbanist movement. Forget about joining unless you’ve been very established in the profession. The “celebrities” find mailing lists to be a place where they can be candid without having to hide behind a handle.
Those in academia also seem to prefer mailing lists to message boards. I believe those involved in development of open source software projects also communicate largely through mailing lists.