Here's some ideas I've jotted down, to make Private Mailing Lists a reality - if this is a feature that could be of interest to you, please give me some feedback, before I plow into it ;)


Private Mailing List

Private Mailing List will differ from Public Mailing Lists in one big way: support for unsubscribing would be optional. Some use cases:

* Private membership for a club/association/group, administrated by only one person (the List Owner), whose membership is not freely available to anyone.

* A mailing list where members pay to be on.

* A mailing list that is one part of a whole system.

Currently, Dada Mail does not support private mailing lists, and all mailing lists are public: even though it is possible to say who can subscribe (and how), there is no way to remove the option to remove oneself. The reason is threat of abuse to the application: how do you stop someone from using a private mailing list, when they really should be using a public mailing list? What would you do, if you found you could not remove yourself from a mailing list?

Feature Breakdown of Private Mailing List:

Private Mailing Lists don't need quite the complicated checks and balances to make sure everyone on the mailing list has been confirmed via a closed-loop opt in system, nor make sure that people who are removed, are never subscribed on again, via the List Owner. It may make sense to have an easy way to change a variety of settings in one place, instead of saying, "Here's some features to enable/disable, to make things smoother" - not sure how that looks as a UX - perhaps just as defaults, when creating a new mailing list. Some things to think about making defaults for private mailing lists:

* Closed List
* Hidden List
* Unsubscription Disabled
* Black List Adding of Unsubscribers Disabled
* Subscription Request Approval Enabled
* Unsubscription is disallowed by users (only by request from the List Owner, and by the List Owner)

Furthermore, some features would not need to be enabled in Dada Mail:

* No Unsubscription Link added, if one is missing
* Removal of the certain List-X Headers (List-Subscribe, List-Unsubscribe, )

Private Mailing Lists may require the addition of Abuse/Complaint Reporting and Tracking, for both public and private mailing lists:

* Adding information about the email message origin, sender, etc in the mass mailing list headers,
* An abuse tracking and reporting link in  the mailing list message (optional?)
* A screen where a subscriber may send a abuse/complaint report to the list owner (and someone else?)
* Added support to the Tracker plugin to view and report on complaints.

It would also be helpful to modify the, dada_subscribers table, to include more meta information about the specific subscription:
* Date Added
* Added, How? (by user, or by admin)
* Confirmed via Closed Loop Opt-in (yes/no)

Then, an enhanced Partial List Sending widget could use these new fields. Some ideas on what you could do with them:

Send to subscribers that are added Before/After "Date Added"
Send only to Confirmed Subscribers

Enabled Private Mailing Lists is something I'd have as a feature, only in Pro Dada - the windfall of abuse reports that will be sent to ME if this is enabled in the free version would be ridiculous. Having a small wall to get over (with the price) should filter out the majority of users would plan on abusing the application, as well as compensate me for any time I have to do, while clearing up misunderstandings on my part of the abuse of Dada Mail (which I am not looking forward to).  I can make it that repeated abuse reports would lead to a termination of a Pro Dada Subscription.







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Justin J: Lead Dadaist.
url:         http://dadamailproject.com
email:    justin@PROTECTED
twitter:  @dadamail
skype:   leaddadaist

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