Hi Jack and Dave,
Well, I've found a source for a new mailing list that will allow us to
communicate directly, laterally, without having the top-down/one-way system
that ListBuilder forced us into. And it's free (although they do have a
donation mechanism we could look at when we see how successful this one is.)
I should point out that the change to a one-way system resulted in our
subscriber list dropping from over 200 to 160.
It is a RootsWeb mailing list called "RCD-Association". RootsWeb generally
focuses on genealogy and history, although they have a military component.
On the basis of the Regiment's longevity, they have allowed us to use their
facilities. I would surmise that we must eventually organize a more active
participation from the Regiment (Archives, Museum, Bursary, Vehicle
Restoration and the like) to avoid appearing only to be an obituary notice
mechanism. I'm sure we'll talk more about that later.
Currently, the list has only we three subscribers. I would like to hear from
you when you receive the first mailing list message and any other
administrative message the list sent you when I added your address.
I will need to do some quick learning of the duties of a List Administrator
and I will need to find an easy way of automatically subscribing the list
from our current List Builder mailing list. I intend to add a new subscriber
icon to our web page shortly. I'm also considering automatically adding the
much larger list of email addresses on the web page as subscribers to this
list and then let the uninterested unsubscribe later. I will let the
ListBuilder go dormant until we are satisfied with the new one and then kill
it before we are billed for another year.
The list is capable of re-transmitting individual messages as they are
released or a digest of the last 72 hours worth, depending on the wishes of
each subscriber. It also has an Archive that every subscriber can access.
All in all, it seems to be better suited to our needs than ListBuilder was.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Norm