phpBB as a mailing list

Quite a while ago, Christian mentioned that he wanted to set up a bullettin board for his SimpleViewerAdmin community, to lessen the burden of offering tech support to users of his free project a little. He mentioned he was looking into various forum systems, and I mentioned I'd seen lots of nice phpBB forums. I also asked him whether he'd found any way of making forums that double as mailing lists, because I usually prefer reading my stuff as e-mail instead of waiting for web forum pages to reload their GUI each time.

Then, a few weeks ago, we needed a web forum for our English drama group. I offered a Yahoo group, but then some people asked for a web forum. One person suggested MSN Groups, which apperently allows both, but asks for a lot of private info and subscribes you to oodles of newsletters by default... urk. It also has lots of ads and a horrible purple color.

Then I remembered phpBB, and checked out their web site again. They hadn't officially added mailing list support, but there was a special "MOD" called mail2forum that added that feature. I installed it and phpBB, set up a POP e-mail account and applied a little Fix, and all of a sudden I had a mailing list/forum combo.

Just thought I'd mention that, in case you wondered whether forum software like that existed.

Reader Comments: (RSS Feed)

Mike Zornek writes: I've heard from others that phpBB is hacked a lot. If you do use it, remember to stay current with it's bug fixes.

Gopal writes: Thanks! I was looking exactly for this information: whether phpBB forum can be used as a mailing list (using regular email addresses)

Or E-Mail Uli privately.