[lug] E-Mail List Hosting Advice

[Chip Atkinson]

I have my own server on Ramnode.  It's like $14/month, which is cheaper 
than electricity to run your own server.  I got the cheapest package they 
offer and it's been more than fast enough.  Their tech support was decent 
enough too.  Oh, also IPV6 is supported.

Here are the issues I've encountered and what I have done to solve them:

1) IP address reputation
    Spammers also use cloud providers and the IP address assigned to you
    will likely have a "poor" reputation.  In addition, the /24 IP address
    space in which your IP will reside will often get rated all as one "domain".
    Solution (at least partially): Make sure that you are not on any black
    lists such as spamcop.net and the many others.  Another rating entity is
    https://www.senderbase.org/.  I ended up having to contact their
    support.  Once my IP address was cleared up, the majority of my
    problems went away since that was the only blacklist I was on.

2) AOL & Yahoo DMARC policies
    AOL and yahoo changed their policy to reject.  This means that
    depending on your list configuration, any one with an AOL or Yahoo
    address won't have their posts seen by everyone.
    Solutions (again, non-ideal):  Configure your list software to show
    the sender as your list.  This means that all postings will show
    only your list and they won't know who originally sent it.
    Install the latest version of mailman, 2.1.18 or some other software
    that has the capabilities of dealing with DMARC issues.

3) Keeping your reputationclean
    After cleaning your reputation up, keep it from going bad.  This
    means moderating your list and not allowing non-subscribers to post.

Chip








On Mon, 14 Jul 2014, Robert Racansky wrote:

> Can anyone recommend a low-cost hosting service for an e-mail list or
> list-serve?
>
>
> I'm involved with an activist group whose members send e-mail to
> everyone by putting the recipients in the "cc" field.  If you're
> reading this, I don't need to explain to you why that is lame.
>
>
> Somebody suggested using Yahoo Groups, which is free, but requires
> users to sign up for a Yahoo account, and there's some resistance to
> that.    So I'm looking for some other service  that would allow
> members to subscribe and unsubscribe themselves.
>
>
> What does BLUG use?
> _______________________________________________
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>