Free ListBot closing down - any alternatives?

[Marcia]

An email just came with news that Microsoft will be closing down the free ListBot service for mailing lists, effective Aug. 20th 2001. It will now be $149 a year; the alternative they suggest is using Microsoft communities.

This leaves the YahooGroups as the remaining alternative for free mailing lists. Topica is also available, but much smaller.

These lists are used by a lot of webmasters not equipped to run their own programs. Are there others that are available (and free) and workable?

For those who can run their own, are there any that are free and simple enough for the average small merchant?

[scott]

I've come across a number of free ones. Just do a search and you're likely to come across a handful of Perl script sites that have them. Here's one site that has some, I think:

[cgi.resourceindex.com...]

[litmania com]

Following, are the features of Microsoft's List Builder with costs "$29.95 per month". Notice something? Although Microsoft make it out to be some kind of amazing service, over 95% of the features were available at Listbot for FREE.

Thanks a lot Bill. You certainly know how to get the webmaster community on your site.

Yet another case of Microsoft buying a free service from another company that their own programmers were too useless to conceive, dupe enormous numbers of people into using it by not giving any clues that it won't be free in the long-term, and then start charging for it.

[Edited by: Brett_Tabke. ex: That is the last time.]

[toolman]

Here is a good list of scripts [hotscripts.com]