Our schools website has an "Opt-IN link" so parents can send their email to signup for school and PTA updates

I set up a hotmail account this year to send out short blurbs / dates / reminders. Hotmail accounts are free. (keeps school stuff seperate from my general account) In our welcome back package, we asked for interested parents to send a quick email to the hotmail account. Much easier, and less chance of errors, to add their email to address book this way. When sending out messages, all addresses go in bcc line so all email addresses are private. Also use this account to announce pto meetings and attach agendas. Overall, very positive response.

wow thank you all for the ideas! I am in charge of the fundraising and am the co-chair of the carnival as well and have found that it is easiest to communcaite with all the volunteers for the carnival through email. now not all have email, so i call them, but it does certainly help to send a message like a meeting reminder to the whole group on the computer vs. hoping they get the letter from a backpack in time. I think setting up a group to do this all would be even better, as right now i am just emailing them using yahoo. I have them all in a list. to make it a lil easier.

With PTO Manager you can search all your volunteers and then select who should get the e-mail, click send and you’re done. Check out the demo at www.ptomanager.com

At the start of the year we begin to gather email address from our members (it is on our membership form). Then we use our website, out directory and our newsletters to get folks to sign up. Right now we are at a little over 300 email addresses. I put them all on a word document and then cut and paste into the BCC column when I send out. Have to send about 6 batches but I've had them all in an address before and lost all of them (aargh) so this has been the safest way for me to go. I use outlook. There are invariably some that come back that I then need to work the issue of a wrong address, or a filter the recipient needs to turn off but in the long run this has been well worth the effort.
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Google Groups also has a service similar to Yahoo Groups. Free. Pretty easy to set up. You have choices as to how people can join/how they can respond.

One thing about email - no matter what else you use, you will likely end up sending some bulk email messages. Might be dozens, might be hundreds of email addresses. Whenever possible, put all the addresses in the BC column.

If it's a group that needs to interact, like a committee - that's different. You want them to all be able to respond to one another.

But when you are basically sending out announcement type info, there is no reason to display all those email addresses. It's a privacy/security/courtesy issue.