Mailing Lists

Hello,

I'm thinking about using the mailing lists :)
Tell me...Can I back these mailing lists so that if one day I need to go for a dedicated server elsewhere, I can back them up and extract them elsewhere?
Is there a search facility for users to search through the mailing list archive?
I'm thinking about using them for announcements (read-only). What limits of recipients do I have?
Thanks,

Charles.

Could some one tell me please?

In reply to:

---

Can I back these mailing lists so that if one day I need to go for a dedicated server elsewhere, I can back them up and extract them elsewhere?

---

After a fashion, you can. The DreamHost Wiki shows you how (linked from the "documentation" link in the Control Panel page for announcement list. Baically, you are just "copying" the list of members as text more processing to import somewhere else

In reply to:

---

Is there a search facility for users to search through the mailing list archive? I'm thinking about using them for announcements (read-only).

---

Not with the announcement lists, though it is pretty trivial to archive the announcements on your your site and make them searchable there.

In reply to:

---

What limits of recipients do I have?

---

None (also linked from the control panel page for announcement lists). Just make sure that you follow the Anti-spam policy carefully. You won't have to worry about that as long as you only mail to those that sign-up via the list itself, but you should be very careful if adding members in any other manner.

--rlparker

I'm not have used the mailing list here on DH, but as far I know they are using mailman, that say you can move your list from one host to other with no hassle even the archives... as if you move to a dedicated you can run the arch command from mailman and from the available history rebuild the archives.

Thanks, guys, I'm done with the announcement list and with the discussion mailing lists. Dreamhost is really nice and makes everything so easy :)

How can I make the mailing list searchable? Do you mean that I could use Google itself? Or some sort of Perl script to parse the files? Is there a cleaner way to achieve it?

Thanks again.

I haven't tried the DH mailing list facility but in the past I was very pleased with Dada Mail. http://mojo.skazat.com/. It's enthusiastically maintained. I don't recall how good the archive feature is but you can see everything including full HTML, images, etc. It's in the feature list - check it out. HTH