Recommend me a group email list solution

[MikeFromLFE]

I look after the communications for a group of canal volunteers. We are spread out over the whole of Leicestershire and rarely meet face-to-face, but it's important (and interesting) that we all know what is going on. Our 'employer' The Canal & River Trust has a messaging solution in the pipeline - but it's a long pipeline!
Up until now we've all happily used a provider called emailDodo.com (great name!) which allows anyone registered with our group to send an email to groupname@emaildodo.com and it will go to all of the other group members. Very simple, easily understood. Unfortunately a number of ISPs and email providers are starting to flag these as spam for reasons I can't fathom.
We need a group messaging solution which is simple and accessible to all the group members. This gets complicated as some of the group out-and-out refuse to use Facebook, others don't have smart phones, and, although we've tried WhatsApp it doesn't work for the sometimes long & complex messages we need to send between the entire group. Dare I say that some of our group members are of a technical ability where email is almost the limit of their IT skills, and can't seem to see beyond using their ISP provided email.
As a group we have no funds, and our employer is reluctant to pony up for a solution because they've got a solution 'coming'.
Any ideas?

[rusky]

Mailchimp is free up to 2000 contacts

Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk

[Jaded]

If your website has CPanel installed you may have a built in mailing list, in fact it is worth checking what is available with your hosting arrangement.

I think Mailchimp is only good for mailouts, not emails from members to go to the group.

I can understand why members don’t want to use Facebook.

[MikeFromLFE]

If your website has CPanel installed you may have a built in mailing list, in fact it is worth checking what is available with your hosting arrangement.

I think Mailchimp is only good for mailouts, not emails from members to go to the group.

I can understand why members don’t want to use Facebook.

CPanel looks promising - thanks.
Yes - I'd had high hopes for MailChimp until I realised it was one-way.

[Jaded]

If you do have CPanel mailing lists and would like help, let me know, I’ve setup a few.

[Valiant]

Google groups or whatever its called is also good.

[Afasoas]

I'm afraid that you are probably still going to run into these spam type issues using your hosting providers mail server. Especially if it's cheap hosting / shared mailserver as the mailserver will inevitably wind up on a set of black lists.

I'm in a similar boat and provide a crude mailing list from one of my mail servers. I provide people with printed instructions on how they can ensure they receive the enails:

1) send an introductory email to the list - that means that email received from the list is less likely to be seen as unsolicited by the recipients mail provider
2) check the spam/junk fodlers periodically and mark any mails from the list as not spam/not junk
3) if the mail provider offers a 'contacts' feature, add the mailing lists email address to contacts

9 times out of 10 that works

[Kim]

The big providers arbitrarily chucking things in the spam folder seems to be an occupational hazard to which there are only partial solutions at best.  People *will* lose things to their spam filtering, and then it'll be *your* fault.  It's not actually a global conspiracy to get people to abandon email in favour of tools the big companies have more control over, but it can certainly feel like one.   

Something I've noticed in recent years is an increase in ostensibly internet-savvy people who don't seem to know what a mailing list is.  We've always had people who weren't capable of using them competently (breaking the threading by replying to random messages, sending personal email to the list, "STOP SENDING ME ALL THESE EMAILS I NEVER SIGNED UP FOR THIS" or whatever), but these are the ones who are going to moan about it being weird and difficult and why can't you just use twitfacehangin.

That's probably an argument for using something like Google Groups, so they can pretend it isn't a mailing list at all.

[drossall]

Absolutely. I do like to remind people that it's the Inter-Net, an interconnection of the essentially independent and private networks of many, many different organisations (including employers, ISPs, universities and so on and so forth). Although there's governance of a kind, each organisation's IT department gets to make decisions about what it's prepared to accept.

So, any IT department staffed by people who don't know about forums and mailing lists, or don't (rightly or wrongly) see them as a priority, may well set its criteria for spam detection in such a way as to reject a proportion of that mail.

Of course, in reality, everyone has to stick within certain norms, or find no mail arriving at all(!), but there is plenty of scope for the loss of mail that's much more important to me than to my ISP, in the name of defending my fellow-customers from spam.

[Afasoas]

It's not actually a global conspiracy to get people to abandon email in favour of tools the big companies have more control over, but it can certainly feel like one.

Microsoft. Return Path.