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Hacks: Mailing Lists with Blogger Pro

Posted June 22, 2003 3:48 PM.

One of the neat features that comes with Blogger Pro is the ability to have your weblog posts e-mailed off somewhere when you publish them. And this presents opportunities to extend your tiny empire right off the web and into people's inboxes. Why not set up a one-way e-mail list which people can sign up to instead of slogging over to your site each day? Or maybe you would like to start a full discussion list with new debates inspired by your daily fevered rantings!

In order to set something like this up, the first thing you need to do is find a free mailing-list site like Yahoogroups (http://www.yahoogroups.com). Set yourself up a basic list to start off with - and decide whether you want everyone to be able to join in with conversation on the list or not. The only thing you have to do is make sure that the e-mail address you (or you and your friends) use in your Blogger settings are signed up as members to the mailing list and are able to post new messages. When Blogger sends out an e-mail containing the text from your latest post, it will make it look as if it came from your e-mail address. So if that e-mail address is not a member of the mailing list, then it will just bounce right off and no one will get to read it.

The last thing you have to do is go to the settings page on Blogger under the e-mail tab and put the e-mail address of your mailing list in the Blogsend field. If you are using Yahoo then this will be formatted like so:

[name of group]@yahoogroups.com

And you're done!

Just two more tips for turning your weblog into an effective mailing list. As soon as you click on publish, your post will be sent out to everyone on your list and can't be taken back. So make sure to edit and revise your post carefully before you publish it - saving it as a 'draft' when you're not working on it. And secondly think carefully about how many e-mails people like to receive in a day - if you're a prolific poster, why not encourage people to receive all your posts in a 'digest' form once a day. That way they'll never want to kill you with axes.

Comments

Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.

"instead of slogging over to your site each day".

Three little letters... R. S. S.

But still, cool hack.

→ Posted by: Tom Morris at June 22, 2003 4:29 PM

Hey don't forget, not everyone has a platform (OSX) which has decent RSS-readers as standard. Some poor bastards are stuck with PCs!

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at June 22, 2003 5:01 PM

that is cool, and easier.

→ Posted by: kavi at June 22, 2003 5:05 PM

Of course, people may have other valid reasons for wanting to kill you with axes.

→ Posted by: Michael at June 23, 2003 2:03 PM

Speak for yourself!

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at June 23, 2003 3:37 PM

There IS a good RSS reader for OSX -- NetNewsWire: http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

→ Posted by: KJC at June 23, 2003 6:18 PM

I know! I was saying there weren't good ones for PCs....

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at June 23, 2003 6:39 PM

Emails are a great idea. Pushed content is not dead!! Tom, where is your email feed?

→ Posted by: Jon at June 23, 2003 10:59 PM

Perhaps a centralised RSS-to-email thingy might be a good idea. You know - give it a list of RSS feeds you like and it would email a digest (or individual posts) for each RSS feed on your list. Oh, and that's my idea - whoever does it must make it noncommercial and get me a drink.

Would save having each site emailing out masses on top of having to brew up RSS for each visitor.

→ Posted by: Tom Morris at June 24, 2003 1:34 AM

Bloglet (http://www.bloglet.com/) is a free subscribe-to-blog-by-email service based on RSS, though it does seem a tad flaky at times.

→ Posted by: xian at June 24, 2003 4:12 PM

With some minor tweaking, (with the addition of RSS feeds for example) YahooGroups becomes an interesting "Blogging App" in and of itself -- many of the existing features would be welcomed by bloggers. The way I see it, Yahoo owes you $3.7 million for pointing out this potentially revoparidgmaticary use of their stagnating service. (Ok, I'll admit it. I just made up the word 'revoparidgmaticary'.)

→ Posted by: fishrush at July 1, 2003 2:16 PM

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