TabMail is Taberna’s email distribution system.  It is closed to the general public and open to property owners and residents of Taberna. Started in December of 2004, it has grown from a dozen pioneering members to over 600 subscribers representing almost 500 residences. With an email distribution list, a person can send an email out to a single group address and have it received by all members of the group. With over 600 subscribers, that sounds like the potential for email activity might be suffocating, but over the last twelve months, average daily activity has been about ten emails per day.  Leading the list of subjects are for-sale items, followed closely by requests for service recommendations.  In fact, we set up a website, www.tabmail.info, to display a list of recommended service providers, with a page devoted to Taberna based business owners.

Any email distribution list has to be hosted on some central server in order to function. Originally we were hosted by local ISP Esisnet, but they eventually sold out, and we were able to link up with Cox Cable.  But then somewhere in the 2008 time frame, Cox sold out to Suddenlink, and they had no provision for handling email distribution lists.  One of our Taberna residents, Charlie Mitchell, was using a service provider called Pair Networks for his own website, www.usafns.com, the Armed Forces News Service, which was a labor of love. As a throw-in to the web hosting service Charlie was paying for, Pair Networks also provided access to a couple of email distribution lists at no additional cost.  Since he was not using these, Charlie was kind enough to offer one of them to me for use with Tabmail.  I accepted. Fortunately for me, both Cox and Pair Networks used the same Linux-based MailMan software to run the lists, so with a little help from Charlie, the conversion was quick and easy.

But all good things come to an end.  For personal reasons, Charlie is giving up his website. His account with Pair Networks will close on 6/30.  (As an aside, if you visit his website, you will note that he would be willing to talk to any volunteer that might be willing to assume and maintain the website).

Because the account will be closing, the potential end of TabMail was staring us in the face, so we had to find an alternative.  One was to acquire the Pair Networks account from Charlie and drop his website so as to reduce the monthly cost, but I really wanted to find a cost free alternative.  The local computer club, New Bern Computer Users Group, looks and works like Tabmail but is set up under Google Groups.  Google Groups is a free service provided by Google which functions very similarly to TabMail from a user perspective. 

Making the conversion was a bit of a one-time pain.  Google does not use the same MailMan software, and they are very concerned about Spam. As a result they limited new additions to the subscriber list to ten at a time, and no more than 100 per day. So the conversion had to be done manually over seven days.

 As I post this article to the web (early July, 2014) TabMail on Google Groups has been live for a couple of weeks, and results have been totally positive.  The user experience is basically unchanged.  The biggest difference is that instead of sending emails to tabmail@nine.pairlist.net, one now must send to tabmail@googlegroups.com in order to post to the list.  Users can still elect to receive all emails or only a daily digest.

I think I have successfully converted over all the subscriber email addresses, but if you are a subscriber and find you are no longer receiving anything from TabMail, please let me know. Use my email address that can be found in the Taberna directory. Likewise if you are not a current subscriber but are interested in getting on the list, you can call me or email me, providing me with your name, email address, Taberna address, and a phone number, and I will get you signed up.