Instead of running a mailing list, I've recently cottoned on to the idea I can simply create a user group in phpBB, called something like "mailing list", invite all my forum users to sign up there (bonus: they don't have any other login info to remember, as it's all in the forum db)......... and then use the mass-mail function of phpBB's admin section to do a mailing list.

Granted, this only works for announce-type lists, but I thought it's such a time saver for me others might find it helpful too

-Ashen

If I got you right and you want to simulate a mailling list, then for each mailling list you can create a topic on your forum (phpBB, Invision, etc) for which you subscribe all users, formerly subscribed to the mailing list by using an sql client, (e.g. phpMyAdmin, or the system's sql client).

Users can then (un)subscribe to that topic as they did on a mailing list.

The disadvantage is that you can end up having some pretty long forum topics meaning space on your disk.

The advantage is the user-friendlyness and the like of a forum, instead of those primitive mailing lists that most linux admins love to use ... Also, your users will have no mail files/databases to maintain.

p.s. You can even convert a mailing list to a forum topic ... i did it once a long time ago with a php script which i tossed away. There might be some forum mods that do this. See the phpBB mods list.

There is also Mail2Forum, which hopes to turn phpBB into a full-featured mailing list bridge...

http://m2f.sourceforge.net/

I've been following it for months and it's very promising...

-j

_________________
Programs that crash have been proven to be less useful than those that don't.
• Apple TechNote 117 •

Thanks for the link, i didn't know about that one. Just a note: it does vice versa also, i.e. forum2emal and email2forum:

Mail 2 Forum (or M2F) is an add-on software to the phpBB forum system. M2F combines the functionality of a mailing list system and a phpBB forum in order to add bi-directional 'email to forum' or 'forum to email' communication.

Cheers

yeah, I haven't had the time to implement it yet, but seems to be coming along rather nicely.

MailGust is the other mail/forum option out there, but it uses its own forum system, which is (probably) not as powerful or extensible as phpBB.

for many more links, check this out
http://www.e-democracy.org/center/eweb.html
(i cribbed this page from the m2f forums...)

-j

_________________
Programs that crash have been proven to be less useful than those that don't.

• Apple TechNote 117 •

He didn't actually mean that. phpBB has a function to make groups called "usergroups", although not a lot of forums make use of it. This forum has one - click on the "Usergroups" link, and you'll see there's one usergroup called "linode-announce", which is basically a mailing list set up in the same way as the original poster said.