Managing Your eGroups Mailing List << 2/4 >>
Adding & Deleting Members
When you elect to manage your list, eGroups takes you right to what is probably the most important page for the mailing list manager, the page where you can add new subscribers, remove and edit them.
Suggesting Subscription
Although the box at the bottom of the page is entitled "Add Subscribers", it does not add new subscribers to your list directly. eGroups has chosen to play it safe.
If you enter an email address in the box and select "Subscribe" what you actually do is sending out an invitation (which you can edit under "Descriptions") to that address. The invited person may then decide whether to subscribe to your mailing list or take no action at all. They will probably decide based on your name (if they know you) and the contents of the invitation.
The time when you most need to manually add (hopefully lots of) subscribers to your list is probably at list creation, if the new list is designated to replace another one. This is where another limitation (an intentional, though) of the form for adding subscribers on the "Members" page shows: you can only enter one email address at a time.
Bulk Suggestion, Bulk Addition
To help this and to circumvent the suggestion you can use the bulk add form. There you can subscribe multiple email addresses at once.
The default is to only send an invitation with the bulk add form as well. You can select to subscribe the email addresses directly and send a welcome message only. In the field below this selection, you can modify the welcome message specified under the "Descriptions" section for this process.
eGroups says sending out merely suggestions is safer and will prevent complaints. This is not necessarily the case as unsubscribing is easy. The real benefit of the invitation method is that it confirms the fresh subscribers' email addresses.
Of course you will hardly ever use the bulk add form and rather rely on people subscribing to your mailing list themselves; this takes some "advertising", which we will cover later in this series.
Deleting Members
No, this is not the perfect way to get rid of your nasty brother. All we want to do is delete the email address of subscribers from the list or, in other words, unsubscribe them.
Removing members is simple. On the "Members" page, tick the boxes next to the subscribers you want to unsubscribe, and select "Remove".
Introduction
Adding & Deleting Members
Editing Member Information
Descriptions, Policies, and Moderation
