Simple Mailing-List (not Newsletter) for Joomla?

Question

Is there a way I can make joomla do the following:

I have several mail accounts that should act as a discussion mailing-list. The administrator (and only the adminstrator) maintains a list of customer email adresses that belong a particular discussion group mail adress. Whenever a Mail is sent to e.g. specialinterestdiscussion(at)mydomain.com, the mail will automatically be forwarded to all customers that belong to that list. If the sender is part of that mailling-list it will not be forwarded to him again. The sender does not necessarily have to be part of the maintained list.

So basically it is a simle mailing list.

Answer 1

I have not found a good fully integrated solution for this myself, but there is a basic MailMan integration that you could search for.

Answer 2

Since Joomla is a php based engine it is simply not not possible. Joomla itself can not run a service in the background which would be required for a mailing list.

Answer 3

Actually there is a way - by integrating a Plugin that runs on site refreshes in the background and checks for mails.

I can recommend Mailster which is a free and Open Source mailing list component for Joomla. It does exactly the job you need it to do, from the feature list:

• Usable with any POP3/IMAP email account
• Recipients are managed by the admin in the backend
• Users can (un)subscribe with frontend plugin (optional)
• All Joomla users can be chosen as recipients, additional users can be stored
• Users can be organized in groups Single users or whole groups can be
  added as recipients of a mailing list
• Replies to mailing list posts can be forwarded to all recipients
• Backend mail archive for browsing the mails
• Full attachment support
• [... more...]

I am using Mailster on my own webpage with a GMail account and it works like a charm.