Using Yahoo or Google Groups to stay in touch with your fellows

Do you have an extended group of folks you'd like to stay in touch with more easily? Wouldn't it be neat to have one email address to use to send an email to all the members of your extended family, or class members, or army buddies in a unit?

Not Your Father's ListServer

Many will know this sort of thing can be done via a mailing list and (traditionally) list servers, but those are often difficult to set up and someone needs to host (and manage) them.

Fortunately, there's a free and very easy to use alternative in the form of Yahoo or Google Groups. Each engine has allocated server space and resources to permit anyone to create a group and invite folks to join. There's no cost to anyone, and no your participants DO NOT need a yahoo or google email account to join (or be added to) your group. Any email address will work.

Who Might Benefit?

The list of possible groups, besides those above, is endless: users of a given product, folks organizing a committee, folks who used to work together and haven't lost touch, or fraternity or sorority members who've never lost touch, or former high school class members, or even members of a current individual class who maybe want to help each other with homework. How about parents of a little league, or of course members of one, or members of a softball or other sports team. There are some such organizations that sign up for dedicated team-building services, but for those who don't have such access, these group tools are a perfect solution.

How Does it Work? Why is it Better Than Simple Email Group Lists?

By signing folks up for a group (or inviting them, or their signing themselves up), all members can then use a single email address to send email to all the members. When they reply, then that reply also goes to all the members. Think about it: no more big (stale) lists of dozens of email addresses in the TO or CC of an email.  It also means people can join or leave the group easily, without remnant/rogue messages from those who "didn't get the memo".

More Than Just a Mailing List: Archived Messages, Photos, Polls, Databases, and More

More than just staying in touch via email, both yahoo and google groups offer a web site to view/store the messages. This makes them searchable, and also serves as an archive for those who join the group later in its life, who can catch up on what's past, if they're interested.

Yahoo goes even further than Google, also offering on the web site a place and means to share pictures (or other files), keep a calendar, take polls, and even keep a database. This really becomes compelling stuff, when you want to keep up with each other whether personally or professionally.

Getting Started

It's really quite easy to get started. Each site walk you gently through the process. And note that while they will tend to guide you through "inviting" prospective members, you can also just "add" members (in Google Groups, at least), so they need not respond to an invitation if you KNOW they want to be in your list (or if you're moving an existing group from some other list management to Google).  Of course, people can also join the group by finding it on the web, or as you point them to it, and you can indicate whether "just anyone" can join or if they must be approved by you first.

And though it's left somewhat unclear on the sites, again at least with Google, your participants not only don't need a gmail address, they don't even need to create a Google/google groups account. In my experience, I've been able to add anyone and they're in, even without an account. Of course, without an account they can't use some of the web-site-based features, but that may not be important to them, if they just want to be on the list. (I don't know if it's possible for people to join via the group's web interface without signing up with Google groups--but again even then I know they don't need to have a gmail address to be in the group.) 

For more information on these services, see