| I have to agree with a bunch of what kxrm said. Email can be hard and I think paying for an MTA probably wouldn't work for a site that allows third-party users to send messages. Paid MTAs don't generally want to be sending mail that you're relaying on behalf of untrusted (or only semi-trusted) users. I think Discourse might be something to look at (https://www.discourse.org). I don't know enough to really offer a great recommendation here, but they offer hosted/paid plans with a pretty good email limits. I think it would allow your users the ability to customize how they received emails and you can reply by email so it can keep the mailing-list-style feeling going. Plus, it's open-source so you could always self-host if you wanted. I think Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), Sam Saffron, and Robin Ward are all pretty well-respected in the community. Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. seems to be a company looking to make something nice in the world (rather than take it over). They make their money as a hosting company and what they host is open source. A lot of people are using Discourse so it wouldn't be blazing new trails. I don't know what your budget is or how many people you have on your mailing list and how much email volume there is, but their hosted prices seem pretty reasonable and they seem to be trying to create a nice business. kxrm noted Google Groups, but one thing I'd bring up is whether Google Groups is accessible in China. It might be, but you did say "globally accessible" and it seems like there could be a decent likelihood that Google Groups could get blocked in China in the future (even if it's accessible today). I guess you also noted that not everyone has access to Google. Discourse seems like something they could host, you could use your own subdomain, and could always choose to host it yourself. For some, they might enjoy the web interface. Others can probably just interact over email (again, I don't have a huge amount of experience with Discourse so you'd want to verify it works how you want it to). It seems like it would offer a nice blend of modernity while still offering and email-based flow for those that want that. |