At 11:57 AM -0400 05/03/99, Chris McFerren ION 202.273.3591 wrote:
>I have a customer who wants to market a mailing list.  He wants to send a
>single e-mail to multiple recipients and if a recipient chooses to
>join the list
>all the recipient would need to do is reply to the message.
>
>I imagine that he could attempt to subscribe as each one of the
>recipients who would then receive a confirmation notice.  This would
>become very labor-intensive as he would have to issue one message for
>each potential subscriber.  Or he could send a message to all instructing
>each person to visit a website to join.  Sadly, this may prove to be too
>difficult for some users.
>
>I am wondering if there is any feature by which the receipeint could
>merely reply to a mass-mailing in order to join the list.
>
>Thank you for your time and effort.
>
>Chris McFerren
>U.S. General Services Administration

Chris,

        Possible, yes. Wise, perhaps not. The poster could send his
messages with Reply-To set (in his E*Mail client) to
[log in to unmask] and make sure the
list header's Reply-To setting doesn't include 'Ignore' (the default
is fine).

        Alternatively, you could set
* Reply-To= [log in to unmask],Ignore
        in the list header to accomplish the same thing.


        This would generally be a bad idea, because with enough
people to make a MLM worthwhile, at least one is going to reply by
asking why you're bothering them, and end up getting subscribed.
Similarly, if you send to a GroupWise account that confirms receipt
of every message, that address will automatically be subscribed no
matter what the user wants (same for vacation programs).

        Basically, replying isn't sufficient to know that the person
really wants to be on the list.

        Nathan's suggestion, of using a manual mailto, is better,
especially if you don't have to deal with a corporate mailsystem that
doesn't handle mailto: .


                                                Chris Pepper

--
Chris Pepper | National Audubon Society: Web & List Manager
212 979 3092 |    <http://www.audubon.org/staff/pepper/>