Best mailing list solution for a conference and its 400 participants?

Question

Update: I still haven't found any easy and good enough solution for mailinglists. We encourage an active community, signup should be dead simple and archives must be easily accessible.

Dear community, what would you recommend for mailling lists? The conference is non-profit, named Smidig2010 (=Agile2010 in norwegian), will have about 400-500 participants 16.-17.november. At the time of writing this, we have not opened for registration, but would like people to be able to participate, ask questions, get informed and get inspired. We've used a forum before, but forums don't seem to be a good fit for this. I would like to set up a mailinglist, It'll have to be KISS, for the users:

1. enter your email (a input box at our site smidig2010.no)
2. get a confirmation mail, click a link.
3. start posting, reading through archives, answering others etc.

I like the look and feel of googlegroups, but I don't like the signup/account creation overhead imposed on the user (Or are there other ways?). I've heard you may combine googlegroups with mailman and stuff, but, yeah, I can't believe our own incompetence on this subject! Btw, we are mostly developers and the conference app is being written in ruby on rails, deployed at heroku.

Being non-profit, we prefer free, but we take everything into consideration. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

use Yahoogroups. You can subscribe using your own email address without having a Yahoo account, using the -sibscribe email address. I though google groups would have that, but maybe not if you say so.

Another service I use is nabble. I use it to archive my mailing list, but they also host mailing lists.

I guess theres no need to roll your own with all these options

Answer 2

You can try librelist. It's really simple to signup, just an email like mailman.

http://librelist.com/

Answer 3

You have expressed your interest on having a "personalized stackoverflow" for that conference on one of your comments.

If that's the case recommend you to keep an eye on stackexchange

It's exactly that - a personalized stackoverflow, developed by the stackoverflow team. It will be free to use AFAIK.

They are not accepting beta requests any more, but the non-beta product should be available before the conference takes place.

Answer 4

Google groups have boxsubscribe. It's in the first tab, general, in Group settings (not sure, my language is norwegian)

It's dead simple to sign up people. Actually, it's a plain POST and you may subscribe to a list as such:

http://groups.google.com/group/SomeGroup/[email protected]

replace SomeGroup with yours, the email to of course. There will be sent a confirmation email to that email, clik the link and you're done.

Maybe this was obvious to many people, but it sure wasn't to me. Hope this helps anybody.