Where Lyris Fits in the Listserver Food Chain

• Majordomo is the freeware favorite. It is good for lists up to 5,000 to 10,000 but then bogs down badly. Many web hosting services provide low cost hosting of lists on Majordomo. It works great for smaller lists, but requires learning how to manually unsubscribe and subscribe members using an e-mail interface. http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/
• L-Soft Listserv is the granddaddy of listserver programs, and many university-based lists use Listserv. I've found it frustrating to get unsubscribed from Listserv lists I'm on, unless I remember the e-mail address I subscribed with. These are very capable servers and can accommodate huge lists. http://www.lsoft.com/products/default.asp?item=listserv
• MessageMedia's UnityMail (formerly owned by Revnet) is considered the Cadillac of the industry right now, both in functionality and in price. UnityMail allows you to send out e-mail from a sophisticated relational database, where content can be sent (or not sent) to specific list members based on IF-THEN logic. For example, if particular list members have purchased sweaters in the past, UnityMail can be configured to send special offers to the sweater purchasers, and other content to the rest. UnityMail also allows complete contact information to be stored with the e-mail address for full e-mail merge capability. UnityMail is quite expensive, and reputedly a big pain to install. Once installed, however, it is a powerhouse. http://www.messagemedia.com/sc/um_home.shtml
• Lyris 3.5 stacks up very well against L-Soft Listserv and Majordomo, but can't compete with UnityMail's superior e-mail merge capabilities. http://www.lyris.com
• Free E-Mail Lists offer an easy-to-use interface, and a great deal of power. They are paid for by brief ads at the end of every message. The big four are eGroups (http://www.egroups.com), ONElist (http://www.onelist.com), Topica (http://www.topica.com), and ListBot (http://www.listbot.com). I'm hosting a dozen discussion sections for my JesusWalk project (http://www.jesuswalk.com) on ONElist at present. Recently eGroups bought out ONElist, but so far, changes aren't apparent in the interface. The free e-mail lists have a much more pleasing interface than Lyris, but lack its flexibility.