River Bend email or RBmail has been in existence since 1997 when I extracted about 20 River Bend email addresses from the New Bern Computer Users Group (NBCUG) list and sent out the first email message to residents. Folks seemed to like the idea and Al Kish, who was well known in town, began soliciting residents to join and the member list grew rapidly. But initially one had to send their message to all members by listing every address until Carolina Connections offered to host both the NBCUG and RBmail lists for free. This enabled members to send email to all members using a single address and the list really took off. But eventually NBCUG and RBmail became plagued by viruses so we moved them to Always-Online, which was the only local server at the time that scanned mail for viruses.

RBmail grew to 500 members when I turned it over to Councilman Charlie Sharpe in 2007. Charlie managed it for 3 years and turned it over to Lonnie Dow in 2010. This was around the same time that I gave to Ellis Miller the NBCUG list I had managed since 1994. This left me with 3 email lists that I had started over the years, which are the New Bern Century Cyclists (200 members), Pickin & Grinin (150 members) and the Ex-NBCUG list of 137 members who dropped out of NBCUG when they began charging $12/year to be on the list. My lists are hosted at Always-Online along with RBmail so Lonnie Dow and I can help each other managing them. In the meantime Ellis Miller moved the NBCUG list to Google Groups which now has 92 members that peaked at 350 members years ago.

After RBmail was up and running municipal lists were started in Trent Woods, Fairfield Harbour and later in Taberna in 2004. TWmail and FHmail both had management problems along the way but survived and the Fairfield list is reported to now have around 800 members. The Taberna list, called Tabmail, has done well according to Wayne Maruna who manages it and now has about 600 members compared to RBmail's 510. A major difference between the lists is the rules for posting. When I started RBmail, we had no rules except to be respectful of your neighbors and it has remained that way for 16 years. I was against censoring mail and felt that rules required a policeman, which I didn't want to be. But with no rules, the downside is that RBmail has lots of traffic. We have about 40% Republicans and are about evenly divided between Democrats and Unaffiliated voters so politics is a heated topic. 

River Bend also has lots of retired seniors who are online all day. Household items, cars, boats, etc., are advertised for sale or free and commercial ads are permitted from the few businesses. Taberna does not permit political, religious or commercial messages so the daily traffic is far less than River Bend. Wayne reported that Tabmail averaged 7.5 emails per day over the past 12 months. I only checked the past couple weeks but the average number of incoming messages per day (with rbmail in the subject line) was 31.

I'm sure some River Benders reading this will wish RBmail to be like Tabmail which is not a social forum, but past polls in River Bend show that the majority of residents don't want rules. Wayne says their list is used mostly for "items for sale (Taberna does not allow garage or yard sales, so this provides an outlet), pets on the loose, notices of events and meetings, pets for adoption, solicitations for charitable endeavors, service referral requests, information requests, and beyond that it runs the gamut - other than discouraged topics."

Wayne Maruna is a computer guru at NBCUG and has a computer column in the TABERNA TRIBUNE. See past issues of his excellent articles at http://pages.suddenlink.net/wamaruna/tribune.html