Maintaining a conference advertisement list

Question

For managing submissions and reviewing for scientific conferences, EasyChair is a great solution, free and well-tuned for the needs of volunteer organizers.

Is there any similar sort of site that supports mailing lists for conference advertisements (e.g., calls for papers, calls for participation)?

I ask because this is a problem that a number of interdisciplinary groups that I participate in have been struggling with, for which a number of the obvious solutions do not seem to be workable:

• Institutional mailing lists don't transfer well when you have a shifting group of organizers.
• Google Groups is problematic for China, won't let you add people without emailing them immediately, and isn't a stable platform since they keep changing how it works.
• Most other commercial mailing list services I've found seems to be either spammy, pricey, and/or otherwise tuned for businesses rather than academic conferences.
• Setting up a collectively owned and managed server seems pretty heavy-weight.

This feels to me like a good niche for someone to have filled with an EasyChair-like service, but I do not know if such a thing currently exists.

Answer 1

Most hosting providers offer mailing list management facilities as part of the hosting. For example, Dreamhost, which I use for hosting my personal domain (mekki.ca), provides announcement & discussion lists that can be configured with granular permissions such that multiple people can administer them. They will be associated with the domain in question.

As such, it's usually attached to the conference website (most hosting providers provide something similar, so contact the hosting provider of your conference's website for details). Since you are already paying for the domain name and hosting of the conference website, there are usually no additional fees for the list management, and anyone who could access the conference website should be able to receive the list emails as well (i.e., China, etc.).

(Full disclosure: The first Dreamhost link is a referral link. If you sign up for services, I get a small credit.)