I would like to start an e-mail distribution list. A user could send an e-mail to one mailbox, and that mailbox would forward the e-mail to multiple e-mail addresses. The tricky part is it needs to be anonymous.
The original sender’s e-mail address shouldn’t show up in the distributed copies. It should show as sent by the group e-mail address. If the recipients want to reply they would just use the goup mailbox to redistribute.
Sounds like an easy request, but I can’t find a way to do this through my hosting company and wonder if there is a term for this kind of service. Listsrv or reflector software all require running your own server…couldn’t find hosting. Does anyone know if something like this exists?
How many people are we talking about here? 10’s? 100’s? 1000’? The problem, as you figured out, is that the “From” part ends up in the body of the email so you’ll have to find a program or filter that can leave that out and even with that you might end up with something in the headers (but I’m not sure about that).
If you can’t find something, you could do it by hand, that is, YOU could be the filter. You could receive the emails and re-distribute just the bodies.
Or, if this is a small group of people (say, less then 20 or 30 that you’re in contact with), you could have them all set up anonymous gmail accounts and use this. But that’s likely to cause other issues such as someone sending something in on the wrong account, but it might be a last resort.
What about setting setting up a free BBS? I think proboards is free, would you’re users be comfortable with that?
Either instruct them on how to set up names that everyone won’t identify with them (BikerBoy1978 isn’t good, ABCD1234 is good) or set them up yourself and make sure email address and other identifiable info isn’t viewable to other members.
Many Yahoo groups are set up this way: each user’s posts are distributed to everybody who asks, and replies work the same way. I’m just not sure if the e-mail addresses can be hidden completely from other users. Obviously, Yahoo knows about everybody and can also tell Big Brother, so it may not fit your requirements.
Will look at mailchimp. I have used it before, but for totally different reasons. Was for marketing purposes and mass mails, but may have functions that would work.
Small group, probably at most 30 people. It needs to be automated, something I could walk away from and have it still work.
We tried going with Google groups and Yahoo groups, but ran into problems. One was that they wanted you to sign up with their services to participate, and both desire to integrate their other services with this account (mainly Google, Google+, Circles, Youtube) It is an AA group and there are strong concerns about anonymity.
BBS is an interesting idea. Will look into it as well. My only concern is there are some older people who aren’t computer savvy in the list and any extra process might cause them not to use it.
I’m willing to shell out a little for it, seems like an ISP ought to be able to offer some type of e-mail hosting with this kind of feature? Is there a term for masking the original sender through a forwarding account?
Mail Spoofing…but I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for.
I think you’re heading down the right road. You want to send it to an email account that forwards only the body of the email to a list of recipients. You might even just want to play with some clients like Thunderbird and Outlook and see if they can do it.
Like I said, some of the From/To/Subject stuff ends up in the body so it’s a matter of finding a way to make sure that doesn’t get copied.
And then, making sure then whole thing isn’t foiled by one of those recipients A)replying to it or B)Signing it with their name.