Update: I still haven't found any easy and good enough solution for mailinglists. We encourage an active community, signup should be dead simple and archives must be easily accessible.
Dear community, what would you recommend for mailling lists? The conference is non-profit, named Smidig2010 (=Agile2010 in norwegian), will have about 400-500 participants 16.-17.november. At the time of writing this, we have not opened for registration, but would like people to be able to participate, ask questions, get informed and get inspired. We've used a forum before, but forums don't seem to be a good fit for this. I would like to set up a mailinglist, It'll have to be KISS, for the users:
I like the look and feel of googlegroups, but I don't like the signup/account creation overhead imposed on the user (Or are there other ways?). I've heard you may combine googlegroups with mailman and stuff, but, yeah, I can't believe our own incompetence on this subject! Btw, we are mostly developers and the conference app is being written in ruby on rails, deployed at heroku.
Being non-profit, we prefer free, but we take everything into consideration. Any suggestions?
Google groups have boxsubscribe. It's in the first tab, general, in Group settings (not sure, my language is norwegian)
It's dead simple to sign up people. Actually, it's a plain POST and you may subscribe to a list as such:
http://groups.google.com/group/SomeGroup/boxsubscribe?email=myid@mydomain.com
replace SomeGroup with yours, the email to of course. There will be sent a confirmation email to that email, clik the link and you're done.
Maybe this was obvious to many people, but it sure wasn't to me. Hope this helps anybody.