I was looking for a solution for a customer: one of their external services (SaaS) sends a weekly email with very relevant information. They wanted this information to go to all their employees, some of their partners and customers, some 50 different email addresses. However, the SaaS service just had 1 field with a destination email address, no built-in support for lists with self (un)subscription.
We looked for an existing solution, but couldn’t find anything that did the job. Newsletter software like Hubspot, ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp can take care of lists, but cannot accept emails as input, they expect the sender to create their copy or template inside an online editor. Also, they’re a bit overkill.
Mailgun Lists can forward emails to a list, however, there are no online subscribe/unsubscribe pages, you have to build these yourself and have them use the API, and there’s no possibility to modify the email before it is forwarded (e.g. to add unsubscribe links) .
So I decided to create a new service which does exactly this: add managed email list forwarding to any product or service.
This is how it works: when you register for a list, you get a unique <yourlistid@thisdomain> email address that can receive emails, and when it’s sure the email came from a trusted source, will forward it to all subscribers of the list. The list automatically has ‘subscribe/unsubscribe’ pages and a privacy statement. The service is email centric, uses email-as-an-API for both the sending of messages and the admin interface (e.g. send an email with subject “list” to get a list of all subscribers to a list).