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42 reasons for hosting your lists with eListas
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We know that a distribution list can have hundreds of different uses, and each administrator always
has very particular needs.
Because of that, we have developed - and continue developing -
hundreds of options and parameters that allow you to configure your list the way you want it,
while keeping the user interface easy to use and intuitive.
Perhaps you have already seen some of these options in similar sites or products,
but eListas
goes beyond all of them. In this page we describe some, not all, of the most significant
possibilities we offer.
INFORMATION ON BRANDED LISTS: Unless otherwise specified, all the features described in
this page are available for all the Free and Standard List Hosting services.
Our services for branded lists include all these features, without additional charges,
along with many other more elaborated features not described in this page,
depending on your needs and the contracted service.
- Leading Company:
eListas is a pioneering and leading company
in providing mailing list and groups services. We have been the number one
destination in all Spanish speaking countries for this type of services for more
than four years (see
http://www.eListas.net/), and now
we also make it available in English.
Our services currently host more than 25,000 distribution lists, which handle more
than 45 million subscribers, and an average of over 250 million messages sent
each month.
This not only proves we have a real and powerful platform,
but also its reliability and the fact that we're here to stay!
On the other hand, a greater number of companies - like Amnesty International,
Yahoo! Spain and many others - use our services to deliver their
newsletters to thousands of users. They trust and use
eListas, why shouldn't you?
Standard Features
- Unlimited messages and members:
Lists hosted by eListas do not have hard limits in the number of members or messages sent to the list.
Whether your list has millions of members or it generates hundreds of messages daily,
our system can handle them all at lightning speed.
- Subscription:
You decide whether anyone can subscribe or if you or the moderators of the list have to approve
new members before their subscription becomes effective.
- Customized subscription forms:
You will be able to include your own subscription forms in your web pages.
- Message Delivery:
Configure your list so that any person can send messages, or limit this function to members of the list,
a trusted group of members, or just the administrator and moderators (such as in a newsletter).
- Moderation:
Are the messages sent directly to the members or do they have to go through
the approval of moderators? Each moderator decides whether he prefers to manage the moderation of messages via email
or from the list administration pages.
- Web Access:
You can indicate whether anyone has access to the archived messages in the web pages, or whether this
function is reserved to list members, or list administrators.
- Welcome and goodbye messages
You can set up your own welcome and goodbye messages, to be sent automatically whenever
somebody subscribes or unsubscribes from your list.
- Message signature:
The messages distributed to the members can include a customized text or HTML signature.
- Subject label/tag:
Some people prefer that the subject of the messages should begin with a label such as [my-list],
others prefer that the subject is left as-is.
eListas let you define what you want to appear in the label/tag, should you want to use one.
- Generation of digest messages:
eListas allows you to define the frequency with which the digest messages will be generated,
whether based on time, message size or by number of messages.
- Members Management:
Manage your member database. Generate listings of members in alphabetical order or date of subscription.
Search for specific users or for users from a certain site, review the subscription history log, etc.
.
Also you can subscribe or unsubscribe any member, send a customized invite message, (un)subscribe several users at once (useful when moving
your list), etc.
- Access to attachments in message archives:
From the message archive pages, not only you can read previously posted
messages (with their HTML formatting, images, etc), but also you have access
to the attachemts that were included in the messages - assuming you allow attachments,
of course.
- Statistics:
As a list administrator, you will be able at any moment to examine the movement of subscriptions/unsubscriptions
from your list, whether daily, month to month, etc.
- Ban list:
Problems with some user? Add them to the ban list. Messages received from emails in the ban list
are rejected automatically, and you can choose whether
they will be notified that they're blocked, or whether to ignore their messages/requests silently.
- Attachments and message format:
Define filters to specify which attachment types are allowed and which aren't.
You want to allow HTML messages but no pictures or ZIP files? Or Word documents, MIDIs, or...?
You decide.
User Interface Customization Features
- Messages listed per page:
In the list archives, you can define how many messages you want to be listed per page.
- Web pages headers and footers:
The web pages of each list can display any graphic or banner the list owner chooses.
Also, list owners can define complete blocks of HTML for the main page of the list
as well as sub-footers, giving a personalized character and identity to their list.
- Colors:
Again, in the list archive pages you can define the colors to be used on different areas, etc.
- Text or HTML?
Not only you can define what message formats are allowed or not, but also each user can configure their subscription
(if you enable that option) to receive messages in either plain text or HTML.
- Complete Branding Solution
Our technology allows for complete customization of all of the brand elements of a
list or set of lists, including domain name, logos, etc. Currently we offer this
as a commercial service to companies and individuals. One example that visualizes the
branding possibilities of our service is (in Spanish)
http://es.boletines.yahoo.net/lista/cine/.
Another one would be http://listas.agujero.com/lista/burejo/.
Supplementary Services
- Share photos, documents and archives:
Each list comes with a file area with up to 10 megabytes of space where you can publish photos or documents to share them
with the rest of the group. This limit of 10 megabytes can be increased up to 1 gigabyte if you wish to subscribe to
the "extended file storage area" service.
In this space you will be able to create new folders where to keep new files,
assign privileges to each folder (who can unload or download files, create subfolders, etc).
A true virtual hard disk available to you and your list members.
- Create polls and surveys:
Anytime you need to ask a question to your list members from which you would like
to obtain more quantitative results, you can create and distribute surveys and polls to your list,
so that the members can provide you with feedback in a comfortable, fast and effective way.
When you create your poll, you can decide who and when can review the results, create additional surveys, who can vote,
whether the vote can be changed, etc.
- Manage your own database:
Define your own tables to store information of any type that you think can be of
interest for the members of your list: interesting sites, address book, references
of books or articles, FAQs, etc.
Also decide who has access to this data, add new records, modify existing records,
create new tables, etc.
- Calendar and Events:
You can write messages in advance (text or HTML) and program the message delivery
for a later date, or periodically every so often; for example "send this message
the second Tuesday of each month".
This area also offers a full-featured calendar, where list owners or members
(if owners allow it) can set particular events, whether they are followed up
by a prewritten message or not, and set reminders to be sent one or several
days/hours before the event takes place.
Special Features
- Bounces:
Not only eListas uses an intelligent system
to manage "bounced" messages, but also, it allows you at any time to examine these
messages, what user caused them, what message generated the bounce, etc.
In addition, eListas offers you total control
over these bounced messages, and not only it allows you to review bounced messages,
but also lets you eliminate bounced records at any time if for any reason you would
like to cancel them.
- Mail Queue:
Sometimes, the mail servers of your members may not respond promptly.
In that case, eListas keeps the messages in a queue and
tries to send them again periodically. In some cases you can examine this mail queue and
see what servers are not responding.
- Create your "autoresponders":
Any person can send a message to a certain email address (such mylist-info@elistas.com)
and automatically receive a message that you have previously defined, with information
on the list, rules, product info, etc. The moment you create a list in
eListas, such list comes with two predefined autoresponder
addresses, and more can be created on demand.
- Subscription/unsubscription notification:
Decide whether you are interested in receiving a notification message whenever somebody
subscribes or unsubscribes from the list.
- RSS Feeds:
Users can also access the content of public lists by using RSS News Reader software,
commonly used for reading or previewing "blogs". This capability also allows for
creating a source of syndicated content.
- Mass-mailing filter:
Our technology allows list owners and moderators to define certain filters to avoid
mass-mailing. For example, a list can be configured so that any member
can only send a determined number of messages within a specific timeframe.
- Distributed delivery/escalability:
Messages are delivered through a pool of servers, picking each time the less busy
server. This results in a faster, more effective distribution of the millions of messages
our system delivers every day. And should we ever grow so much that the current
pool of servers does not seem sufficient, our technology allows for adding as many
servers as necessary, so there's no problem there.
- Additional subscriber information:
This feature is only available branded services.
You can request subscribers to enter additional data when subscribing, such
as name, country, age, gender, etc. All the additional fields can be configured
to be mandatory or not.
- Targeted distribution:
This feature is only available branded services.
Based on the additional subscriber information, you can later send messages to
a specific target within the list. For example, you may decide to send a
message only to members that live in Italy and that are 30 or more years old.
- Open-rate:
This feature is only available branded services.
When you send HTML messages, you can select to keep track of the open-rate,
that is, how many members have opened the messages (restricted to messages
opened while the reader is online).
- Click-through rate:
This feature is only available branded services.
You can send messages with links to specific web pages, and keep track of the
click-through rate.
Other Miscellaneous Features
- Copies of your messages:
When a list member sends a message, you decide whether the sender receives a copy of his/her own messages or not.
- Responding to the list:
You can choose if, when somebody replies to a message, the message goes automatically to the
list or to the sender of the original message.
- Empty messages, or messages without subject:
You can configure your list to reject empty messages or messages without subject.
- Filter out command messages:
It is not unusual that some people send messages to the list that begin with
"subscribe", "unsubscribe" and similar things. You can configure your list to accept or to reject such messages,
informing to the user of the error in the last case.
- Minimum and maximum size of messages:
If you do not want to accepto messages of more (or less) than x characters,
you can adjust these limits from the administration pages.
- Best customer service:
Other services' customer service is provided by people who have
not participated in the development or QA of their system, and so
their ability to provide support is limited to what they've been
trained for, and so their knowledge about their own service is not too found.
In eListas,
the team of experts that would be taking care of you have been part of the
team who also worked in the development and QA of our products and
services. We not only know what our system can do and how but also
know how to extend its capabilities to better fit your needs.
Moreover, we have been providing top-notch customer support to hundreds
of clients during the past four years, and have yet to find a single
client who is not thrilled to work with us.
The list goes on and on, but rather than having an endless list of features,
if you have a particular need not listed here,
contact us, as chances are
we're already offering it in our standard services or products.
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