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List:       list-managers
Subject:    Re: Poor Man's List-Maintenance (was: Re: majordomo on the
From:       Eric Thomas <ERIC () SEARN ! SUNET ! SE>
Date:       1995-01-29 1:04:11
Message-ID: 199501290132.RAA12311 () miles ! greatcircle ! com
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On Sat, 28 Jan 1995 11:20:09 -0800 Dave Del Torto <ddt@lsd.com> said:

>As  far a  maintaining a  list, you  can do  that through  any ISP  that
>supports  Majordomo or  LISTSERV,  but you  are at  the  mercy of  their
>support staff, and any changes you want to make can become complicated.
>[...] Let  me describe another  scenario for reasonably  low-cost access
>and list-maintenance  that leaves  you in  pretty reasonable  control of
>your own shop. [...]  In the case of Netcom or CRL (to  use two No. Cal.
>examples), you'll  need to spend a  relatively small amount of  money to
>set up a (business) SLIP account (approx $400? setup fee, $150? monthly,
>your mileage  may vary),  as the  low-cost (~$20/month)  "personal" SLIP
>accounts that offer _fixed_ IP addressing (which is necessary to support
>your custom domain  scheme) are pretty impossible to find.  The fixed IP
>address means that  the ISP can configure their nameserver  to route all
>mail  (no matter  what the  userid@yourdomain.xxx) to  your POP  account
>where you can pick it up at your convenience.

Ok,  so  your alternative  costs  $400  setup  + $150/month.  This  price
includes  SLIP  service  for  your  personal needs.  Your  list  is  only
operational when you  care to call the service provider,  and you have to
use  what list  management  software may  be available  for  your Mac  or
Windows machine.

You seem  to say  that for $20/month  you can get  the same  SLIP service
except with a random IP address (the figures I've seen on the wire were a
bit higher, but then I don't live in the US and admit my ignorance on the
subject). For $30-50/month you can get a mailing list on a professionally
managed system  with the real  LISTSERV. This  machine will of  course be
reachable  24h a  day and  will  have much  better Internet  connectivity
(probably T1). Even if they're not  otherwise very helpful, you can trust
the support  staff to keep  the machine up because  they'd have a  lot of
phone calls from angry customers and subscribers otherwise. You only need
their intervention to  create the list, and after that  you can manage it
yourself remotely. So  it's not like you're really all  that dependent on
the support staff.

For a more stable/permanent address, you can register your own domain and
have "someone"  create a  mailbox under  your domain  that points  to the
list.  I'm not  sure if  service providers  offer that  kind of  service,
though.  If   you  use   LISTSERV,  your  list   will  be   reachable  as
xxxx@LISTSERV.NET no matter where it is  located, so you can publish that
address. If  the list host turns  out to provide lousy  service, you just
switch to  another provider. In fact  SUBSCRIBE requests sent to  the old
provider will continue to work, assuming  of course that they deleted the
list when you stopped paying, which seems a reasonable assumption.

  Eric

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