A mailing list is a group of people you send to, by email, text, or postal mail. Argenta has two kinds, and they work differently.

Hand-built lists

You choose who's on a hand-built list. You add and remove people yourself, and it only changes when you change it. Use one when the group is specific and personal, like a short list of board members or major donors.

Smart Lists

A Smart List fills itself from a rule you set once, like "anyone who's a Donor" or "everyone subscribed to the Newsletter." It stays current on its own as people come and go. Use one whenever "who gets this" is a rule rather than a fixed set of names.

Both kinds send the same way. The only difference is how the list gets its people.

How lists relate to topics

A topic is what a person signs up for, like your Newsletter or Volunteer Updates. A Smart List can point at a topic, so the list is always "everyone currently subscribed to that topic," with no upkeep. This is the cleanest way to email a group that changes all the time: let people manage their own membership by opting in and out of the topic, and let the list follow along.

Reading the counts on a list

Each list shows how many people are in each state:

• Subscribed is who a send actually reaches: a valid address, and not unsubscribed.
• Unsubscribed asked you to stop. Their address works fine; you just can't email them.
• Cleaned means the address is dead. It bounced, was marked as spam, or was suppressed. Argenta won't send to it, because doing so hurts your delivery for every future email you send.
• Unreachable means there was never a usable address to try.