Newsletters

[vinnybop]

I've been looking to send a newsletter to 1000 to 2000 subscribers to my site about twice a month. It seems like most services are around $50 a month or more. It doesn't need to be fancy. Email would work if I didn't have the long list of recipients at the beggining of the message. An eyesore. But even if I could solve that with an e-mail I'd still have 1500 addresses to add every time... Hotmail? I don't even know how many addresses you can have but would rather not do the experiment.
At present there are only 67 people on my list.

[Gibble]

Send bulk emails with BCC so nobody sees each others email address

[vinnybop]

Learn something new every day. Bcc.
Thanks a lot

[mattglet]

create a script that loops through your email list, and sends off one email at a time.

-Matt

[Gibble]

Matt, BCC is faster, sending a couple thousand emails one at a time takes forever...

[mattglet]

absolutely not. as long as your script doesn't contain insane overhead, you can usually send out 1000 emails in just a minute or 2.

-Matt

[edit]I'm not saying BCC is slower, just that it doesn't take forever to send via script[/edit]

[Gibble]

Maybe it was the fact I was using asp and had to use a microsoft object to send email ... hence, bloated and slow.

[Shadows Papa]

vinnybop - I paid $100 and bought an ASP package that allows folks to sign up on our web site, allows double-opt-in, and I can type in a message and send to 750 people in 2.5 minutes, and that's over dialup. Users can add or remove their own addresses. They can choose Text or HTML messages. Choice of server mail, I use ASPEmail as that is one package our host runs on his servers.
The support is fantastic, you pay once. It took me less than 30 minutes to have it all installed and working.
It uses Access database. I suspect they MIGHT have a mysql version wich would support more than a few thousand addresses, but for a couple thou, this package should work fine. It's easy to maintain, can import existing mail lists, etc.
I used to use Outlook and that totally stunk! took forever. (again, all we can get here is dial-up, no DSL, no cable, etc.)

Shadows Papa

[PayPalDave]

Topica and Constant Contact (Roving) both have great solutions that are around $5-20 per month. i've used both of them and found they're pretty easy to work with.

if you want to try either of them out for free, you can signup here & test drive them for 30-60 days:
[paypal.com...]

if you want other info on newsletter solutions, Dr. Ralph Wilson has a pretty extensive set of reviews here, although it's a bit dated (summer '02):
[wilsonweb.com...]

he also has an ebook on this subject here:
[wilsonweb.com...]

[hannamyluv]

Vertical response has a great system for a penny an email and (or less if you buy more) it's pay as you go. I WOULD NOT recommend BCC. CAN SPAM has standards on processing opt-outs and BCC will make it manual on you.

[I Dream In Code]

phpList has been good to me. It's free, opensource, works with a mysql db, and has a user interface to signup or opt-out. The admin interface is easy to use also.

[tincan.co.uk...]

[toddski07]

I completely agree with hannamyluv and would NOT recommend using BCC to send out 1000 emails. This will almost certainly flag the message as spam in numerous spam/email programs. Your best bet is to send them out individually either using a script or using a 3rd party company.

Just my two cents.
Todd