At 3:33 PM -0600 2004/02/28, ALexia Helfand wrote:

I'm looking for a program that will help me organize my mailings and I'm wondering if Mailman is the answer.

Don't know.  Let's take a look at your requirements.

                                 I need to be able to add new people

to my lists,

Yup.

          have a tracking system so that I know how many people who

received the email actually read it,

There is no mail system on the planet that will actually let you 

do this. Send everyone to a web server where they are forced to log in, and you can track where they go. Even if they "view" a page, you can't be sure that they actually read anything on it.

                                  organize things so that I can send

one email to lots of people even though my mail server only allows me to send to 45 people at a time.

Not a problem.

Please let me know if Mailman is the answer. Also, would it have to be installed on my host server,

Depending on what they're running, this may not be a problem.

                          or could it be installed on my PC?

Depending on what your OS is, it could run on your PC.

                                                             If

mailman is not what I am looking for, pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

For handling reasonable sized mailing lists, I don't know of any 

better freely available tool than Mailman. There are commercial tools which may be better, but they cost money.

But I don't see any way that any program on Earth can help you 

around this problem of being able to have a guarantee that you know exactly how many people received your message, and of them how many actually read it.

-- Brad Knowles, brad.knowles@skynet.be

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E-(---) W+++(--) N+ !w--- O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++) tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- r---(+++)* z(+++)