Published in the Dallas/Fort Worth Unix Users Group Newsletter, April 2001
I recently started sending out an electronic newsletter to promote my new consulting practice. Here are my experiences with setting up a mailing list for my newsletter using Subscribe Me Lite.
I looked around at a few of the public mailing list servers, including Yahoo Groups, and Topica. But none of the documentation explained how to get rid of the ads that get attached to each email. Back when Yahoo Groups was eGroups, the list owner could pay a fee to get the ads removed. So I looked for fee-based mailing list services, and concluded that my little list wouldn't justify the fees that they charged.
For my first newsletter, I punted, and used the time-honored "Bcc" method of mail distribution. I put my own address in the "To" header, and put all the recipients as a Blind Carbon Copy (Bcc), to protect their privacy. Then I hoped that I wouldn't get caught in everyone's spam filter - depending on how my own filter is configured, it can't distinguish legitimate Bcc's from spam.
Then I remembered a recommendation from Ryan MacMichael, the webmaster at Cigital. He had recommended a program called Subscribe Me Lite. Cigital uses this program to manage two different mailing lists at http://www.cigital.com/maillist.html. The program is available at http://www.cgiscriptcenter.com/subscribe/index2.html.
Subscribe Me Lite is suitable for announce-only lists. That suits me fine, because I don't intend for the subscribers to be able to send messages out to everyone else on the list - I'll only be mailing out my newsletters on the list. In return for accepting that restriction, I'm rewarded with a fairly simple setup, especially compared to the elaborate hoops I've had to jump through when setting up Majordomo lists in the past. So there was no reason for me to deal with the fees and ads involved with the full-service list servers.
Subscribe Me Lite is a perl script that runs on a web server. Versions are available for both NT and Unix-based web servers. I suspect both versions are very similar. I installed it on a Linux 2.2.16 server running Apache. The instructions are a bit difficult to wade through. The instructions in the readme file include a change log and a long annotated list of the configuration options. At the very bottom - something I missed the first time through - is the directions for accessing the administrative interface. Getting to this interface is very important, because there is no password set when you first install the program, and the first person to use the program is invited to set the password.
To do the installation, I started by editing a handful of configuration options at the top of the script. I'd rather that the options were in a separate configuration file. I had to search a little bit to find the path to the sendmail program - /usr/sbin/sendmail in my case. I created a directory outside the view of the web server to store the subscriber list and the password file. Then I put the script in my cgi-bin directory, set the execute bits, and I was ready to run.
On my first attempt to run the script, I realized that I had left off a backslash in an email address when I did the configuration. Debugging consisted of hitting a mostly unhelpful error from the web server, then checking the server's error log for details. With that fixed, I ran into an even more unhelpful error, and the error log said "malformed header from script". It turned out that I had permission problems on the directories I had set up. I had to change them to wide-open 777 permissions. I'm still trying to determine whether I can take advantage of Unix group privileges to make the permissions more restrictive again. It was frustrating that the error message didn't mention the permissions problem.
With a few glitches out of the way, I took the sample html code provided with the program, customized the look, and put a subscription form on my web page. New subscribers are now trickling in!
The CGI Script Center also sells a Professional version of Subscribe Me for $199, and an Enterprise version for $299. I may consider upgrading if my needs get more sophisticated. You'll see my use of the program at http://www.tejasconsulting.com/ and also http://www.testingfaqs.org/.
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Danny R. Faught runs Tejas
Software Consulting as an independent consultant, focusing on software quality issues. He can be reached at
faught@tejasconsulting.com.