listserv

Despite the increasing relevance of social media tools like blogs, twitter, facebook, etc, the best place to connect with people remains their email inbox. Especially in Africa, email mailing lists such as Pambazuka News, WOUGNET-L, and African Democracy Forum remain essential online platforms enabling civil society activists and practitioners to connect, inform and support one another on a daily basis. We helped start all three of those lists back when Kabissa provided traditional domain hosting services, but have since moved on to promoting social media. Now to go forward while going back: let's revisit mailing lists.  

I was pleased to receive the announcement below regarding the release of the latest version of Dada Mail, a powerful listserv tool. It's free software that is fairly easy to install on a traditional server supporting the Perl programming language, and very easy to use once installed. I've always been a big fan, not least "Since Justin is an Artist, he has decided that Dada Mail is an Art Object." Check out the Dadamail Manifesto for more details about what Dada Mail can do and how it can be viewed as an art object.

We always resisted implementing Dada Mail for Kabissa because we wanted to create an integrated community platform, which we were able to do with Drupal. This doesn't mean it can't be a perfect email companion to your website.

I received this message in the Kabissa support mailbox recently from a Kabissa member:

please how do i create a listserv and the process of distributing an html newsletters?