Which tool for newsletters?

[joe]

I want to ask which tool are you using to sending out your newsletters. I need a good stable tool where I can sent out my newsletters as multi-type message with HTML and TEXT-Body. I've used a web-app from my webhoster in the past, but it costs me money for each mail I sent out. :-(

It doesn't matter if it's a php-script or a stand-alone windows application as long as it's good and stable.

[Didier]

ListMessenger is quite good: http://www.listmessenger.com/ but it's not free

Didier

[michalczyk]

A free and easy solution is to use your email client and BCC the newsletter. I have about 300 subscribers and use Thunderbird to send out newsletters. If your provider limits the amount of email you can send out per timeframe, just split the amount you send at a time. It's no hassle unless you have a huge amount of subscribers. I guess email clients might have a limit to how many email addresses one can BCC in one go but so far Thunderbird accepts all of mine. And again one could split the list of subscrbers and BCC the newsletter a few times. The only problem with this solution is dealing with unsubscribers and dead addresses (I wrote a script for that). But if you don't have many subscribers this is an easy and free solution anyway.

[RinkuHero]

I looked at these before, though I really don't have need of them yet, and haven't been able to find any free ones that don't have ads and aren't limited to 100 or so subscribers. If you want one for free you'll probably have to either put up with ads, or use something like a yahoo/msn/google group (which has the problem that it requires a person to get an email account or passport with yahoo or msn or google).

Another idea is to use a forum as a newsletter -- some free forums technologies (like simplemachines.org) have a way for an administrator to email everyone registered on the forum (although when they register they can elect not to recieve those emails); so someone signing up to that forum would in effect be on your newsletter.

And as michalczyk above says, I also thought of just collecting emails to use, manually adding people and removing people from that list when they ask, storing the list in a text file, etc. -- and that should work for awhile, it probably wouldn't get out of hand if you only have a few hundred subscribers.

[ApeZone]

Give http://www.ymlp.com/ a try. They're free. I've used them for years without problems.

[Tom Cain]

I've used Mail Them Pro in the past, it worked very well. It has it's own SMTP server so you don't have to use your ISP's or web server's mail server.

I now use Ezine Director. Having used both, I highly recommend using an online service like Ezine Director with subscription management capability instead of a desktop application. I've found it to be much better if you mail regularly.

[Nexic]

YMLP is cheap and reliable. Not had any problems with them for just over 2 years.

[cyrus_zuo]

Another vote for YMLP.
I used eZine before it, but wasn't nearly as happy...

[digriz]

I use ymlp too. The non-advert pro version is pretty cheap.

[lakibuk]

I've used Mail Them Pro in the past, it worked very well. It has it's own SMTP server so you don't have to use your ISP's or web server's mail server.

Can anyone explain what this means (quote from their site):
"Your letters are sent directly, so you don't need to use your provider's SMTP email server."

I am asking because my provider only allows 25 mails / 5 minutes.

[michalczyk]

Can anyone explain what this means (quote from their site):
"Your letters are sent directly, so you don't need to use your provider's SMTP email server."

I am asking because my provider only allows 25 mails / 5 minutes.

I suppose they say that they use their own SMTP server, ie, they take take care of it all.

[lakibuk]

Aha,doesn't it rather mean that the application itself is a SMTP server,too.
Anyway,sounds just like what i need.

[Tom Cain]

Aha,doesn't it rather mean that the application itself is a SMTP server,too.

Yes, the application is the SMTP server. This means that it gets all rejections/bounces to itself and gives you a report.

It also means that your sending address is going to be your computer. This will probably flag some spam blockers these days. I imagine that if your ISP has an SPF record for its domain and the receiving server checks SPF, your email will be blocked since your computer won't be an authorized SMTP server on the ISP's network.

Spam blocking is the main reason I switched to a dedicated service.

[lakibuk]

Ah darn! So the tools doesn't work, YMLP's $15/month is too expensive if i only send 1 letter per year and my own PHP script doesn't work because my webhost is restrictive.
Any alternatives?

[Tom Cain]

Campaign Monitor is a service that charges per mailing instead of monthly. I've never used it but have heard good things. They manage your subscriptions but only charge when you send email: $5 + 1 cent per recipient.

[joe]

I'm wondering if there aren't any good (and free) php scripts which I can run from my server?

[Dingo Games]

Ah darn! So the tools doesn't work, YMLP's $15/month is too expensive if i only send 1 letter per year and my own PHP script doesn't work because my webhost is restrictive.
Any alternatives?

Couldn't you just throttle your script so it only the e-mails slowly (within the 25 mails / 5 minutes limit). Should work unless your mailing list is really big... works out to 7200 per day.

[lakibuk]

Yea, i tried that. Had some problems like emails stopped being sent after 100 or so. Also php does not allow me to set the "return-path".
That's why i need an alternative.

[lexaloffle]

Here's an example of a very simple php mailer which might be useful for some people. It works for me doing 2000 mails from my shared ipowerweb server.

	
	//construct $email_list here

	$emailfrom = "news@foo.com";
	$message = "Hello World";
	$footer = "To Unsubscribe: http://www.foo.com/unsub.php?email=";
	$subject = "foo noos";

	foreach ($email_list as $value)
	{
		echo "mailing:   $value[0]...\n";
			
		$message2 = $message . $footer . $value[0];
	
		if (mail($value[0], $subject, $message2, "From:$emailfrom"))
			print("ok\n");
		else
			print(" *** error!\n");

		flush();
		sleep(2);

	}

[Warlock]

Hello,

You can try DADA Mail (http://mojo.skazat.com/ ), it's free.

[jankoM]

Here's an example of a very simple php mailer which might be useful for some people. It works for me doing 2000 mails from my shared ipowerweb server.

Hi can I ask you something... do you send all 2000 emails in one script run or do you split them. Because php scripts ussually have a timeout of 30seconds and I have never tried them make run much longer (I know for the set_time_limit() ) but I thougth there would be something wrong if I set it to 4000 for example?

best regards,
Janko

[lexaloffle]

Yes, I send all of them from the same script so it runs for about an hour. I didn't know about the timeout thing. It spends most of its time sleep()ing though, and apparently the clock stops during blocking calls. So perhaps my script does actually run for less than 30 seconds.

Yep, I just checked the settings using ini_get('max_execution_time') and it's 30 seconds. Blind luck.

-J

[joe]

a friend of me who sends out a lot of Newsletters recommened me SuperMailer (http://int.supermailer.de/) and I had a look at it and it seems to be a very powerful but cheap tool.