Daily Archives: July 25, 2008

One of the most basic ways to begin connecting your church to others via the Internet is through an email list, sometimes known as a listserv. Email is the most basic form of communication on the net, and pretty much continues to be used by most folks on a regular basis. Yet, it is amazing how many churches aren’t using this important means of communication in an effective way, often because they think that it may be too expensive.

Of course, the most basic way to do this is to create a mailing list in your e-mail program (often called an email client) and send emails to everyone on that list. While that is functional, especially for small groups of 10 or 20 people, the fact is that if often breaks down for big groups, and has some unintended consequences. Since this was one of the earliest form of spamming others, spam filters are particularly sensistive to e-mails with multiple addresses, and often blacklist those who send out lots of messages in this way. Additionally, these e-mails end up including the e-mail address of every recipient in the message, which is not a responsible way to handle personal information. Simply put, there are much more effective ways of handling e-mail lists than creating one in your copy of Outlook Express.

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