Overview

  Creating a mailing list on a Drupal website appears at first to be a daunting task. But that is largely because many modules are involved and there is no documentation addressing how all of the parts work together.

  If you’re building a Drupal 6 website from the ground up because Drupal 7 doesn’t provide all of the functionality your site needs, OpenAtrium provides a good, almost out-of-the-box solution. But you can build a mailing list on an existing site and get the benefit of some more up-to-date modules not included in OpenAtrium.

  Two lists follow: one of modules you will need, the second including modules you will need to add bells and whistles to your listserv. Most of those are used if you will allow posters to upload files and images attached to nodes and/or comments. A few provide other functionality. For example, if you want to have a moderated list, install Action Email Roles to notify moderators that new posts need their attention. If you want to let your posters send email from more than one email address, install the Multiple Email Addresses module.

  The setup uses Organic Groups for creation and management of mailing lists. It uses Mailhandler, Mail Comment, Feeds and Feeds Comment Processor to handle incoming emails that will be converted to nodes and comments. Finally, it uses Messaging, Notifications, HTML Mail or MIME Mail, and PHPMailer to send messages to group members/subscribers.