Recommendations for Newsletter Software/Service

[Draegan]

Would anyone be able to recommended newsletter software and/or services?  I don't need or want any sophisticated but I was hoping for something either free or inexpensive.  I don't have too much expertise in these things other than doing mail merges from MS Office. 

Help please.

[Sand]

Constant Contact.

A) You get a free trial
B) The learning curve is easy
C) I am HORRIBLE at graphic design and even made our newsletters look awesome!
D) After free trial is over its cheap
E) After sending newsletter email you can archive the newsletters and post links to them on your social media outlets.

[Lantyssa]

Depends upon your price range.

Constant Contact can get very expensive.  We implemented phplist using a mySQL database which was tied to Filemaker.  So we went from $80 a month to only the $7 a month we were already paying for the webhost.

The webhost we used also had built-in mailing list software, but I never tried it out.  If it could tie into a mySQL database, then it probably would have been just as good.

[Sauced]

MailChimp, no question.  Don't tell my employer I said that.

http://mailchimp.com/

[Trippy]

Depends upon your price range.

Constant Contact can get very expensive.  We implemented phplist using a mySQL database which was tied to Filemaker.  So we went from $80 a month to only the $7 a month we were already paying for the webhost.

Yes they can. They also are very paranoid about people using their service to spam. Once you get to a significant size you basically have to call them to "unfreeze" your account every time you make a significant update to your email list. The company I work at ditched them because of the cost and the hassle.

[Salamok]

It's a small world, at the moment I'm actually in the midst of writing mass mail component for use in all our web craplets.

Back in the spam days I used to use a program called Campaign Enterprise that was pretty decent (wasn't free).  I suspect your main problem is going to be finding something that makes designing the newsletter easy for someone who has no html design experience.  

Nearly all shared hosting solutions throttle the amount of mail you send out (max out at anywhere from 500 to 5000 a day).  Another big advantage of using a service is that you wont trash the rep of your mailserver.  These are both good reasons not to use phplist.

How often do you want to send out a newsletter and how many subscribers are you sending to?

[Sand]

Depends upon your price range.

Constant Contact can get very expensive.  We implemented phplist using a mySQL database which was tied to Filemaker.  So we went from $80 a month to only the $7 a month we were already paying for the webhost.

Yes they can. They also are very paranoid about people using their service to spam. Once you get to a significant size you basically have to call them to "unfreeze" your account every time you make a significant update to your email list. The company I work at ditched them because of the cost and the hassle.

We have a mailing list of around 3k and its cheap. And much easier than doing all that php/sql/ninerninerfourzero/whatchamawhosit stuff.
How many people did you have on your email list?
By Draegan's post I assumed he needed something for a small number of people.

Edit: And as Salamok said and I mentioned you dont need to know squat for HTML programming.

[Salamok]

My experience with constant contact is from about 5-6 years ago and the impression they gave me is they had this idea of what they wanted to do for you but they didn't really know how to do it, I'm sure they have improved their product since then.  The best part of constant contact was the different media types (send a thank you card via snail mail, followed up by an email after 30 days, then put em on the monthly newsletter and quarterly post card campaign) get all the campaign benefits of goldmine w/o having to use goldmine, etc...

Mailchimp on the other hand specializes in email and is probably one of the most successful companies doing that, you can also pick your poison anything from using a template designed by them and uploading your address list to providing you with an API to use within your own programs.

[Draegan]

MailChimp, no question.  Don't tell my employer I said that.

http://mailchimp.com/

Someone else mentioned this to me.  I gave it a look today.  I like what I see.

[Lantyssa]

Oh, another problem with Constant Contact we had is that once someone unsubscribes, they are gone forever in their system.  Not even the user can sign back up to your list.  Paranoid about spam is an understatement.  (We had around 10k e-mails, if I recall correctly.)

We got around the mail server limitations with phplist by 1) talking with our provider about limits, and 2) adjusting phplist's hourly limits to half that.  The only tough part was getting them to turn cron on, because the host had functionality for it, but they disabled it by default, and periodically they'd shut it off on us.  Doing this, we could get the entirety of our list out in 24 hours, which we sent out about once a month, or once a week closer to election time.

[fuser]

We use campaign monitor, but it's aimed more towards developers and has a lot of reselling features. Ton's of API's that will allow you to snap in two way syncing of your database back and forth. The reporting is really nice and user friendly.

[Salamok]

Oh, another problem with Constant Contact we had is that once someone unsubscribes, they are gone forever in their system.  Not even the user can sign back up to your list.  Paranoid about spam is an understatement.  (We had around 10k e-mails, if I recall correctly.)

We got around the mail server limitations with phplist by 1) talking with our provider about limits, and 2) adjusting phplist's hourly limits to half that.  The only tough part was getting them to turn cron on, because the host had functionality for it, but they disabled it by default, and periodically they'd shut it off on us.  Doing this, we could get the entirety of our list out in 24 hours, which we sent out about once a month, or once a week closer to election time.

I like how they vastly overstate the amount of resources sending email requires, it's all a bullshit argument used as an excuse for not having to deal with spammers.  My dedicated server was sending several hundred thousand emails an hour w/o a noticeable performance hit to the rest of the services it was providing.  I suppose if they just said "NO SPAM" everyone would be calling them and arguing over how their precious emails are not spam. 

If you are sending email and not using a service it is worth the extra $15 a month to upgrade a shared host to a VPS where you don't have to deal with splitting your jobs up to avoid the throttling crap.