Hey guys. Can any of you reccomend a good mass mailer/newsletter service that will accept paypal as a method of payment? Thanks
I use my own, you can find several free ones that will hook up to your website if you have php/mysql. They can easily handle a couple of thousand customers... I would be thinking that's a cheaper/better option.
You could try YMLP.com As it happens, they only accept one payment method for the paid service and that's PayPal...go figure
AS Robert says... get a free script and add it to your website (with mysql/php abilities). <edit 13/10/05> please ignore this newb advice above. I do still use scripts on my own site but it is NOT how to do it. Use a service and don't get your domain blocked! (reasons stated in GOOD answers below)
Think long and hard before you decide to use a script to do your own newsletter. Here's why: 1. When a user clicks "this is spam" in AOL (and they will even though they subscribed), it auto generates a complaint against your domain and ip. This can quickly lead to you being blacklisted. Then what do you do when a customer mails for support and they can't receive your reply? In addition, many hosting providers won't like you receiving those complaints. 2. Many large email providers do grey listing. This happens when they get several mails in a short period of time to different members- they automatically assume it's spam and "bulk" the rest of those emails for a couple hours. So your newsletter doesn't reach its audience. Well-respected email list services have agreements in place with these major providers. 3. Scripts take time to set up, manage, and usually have very poor bounce removal handling. Do you really want to deal with all that? I don't, and use YMLP.
I would ban AOL users from my site anyway Seriously - if you have as much traffic as RETRO64 then do what is best.. us smaller/newer sites do not need that and we can "manually" handle a lot of stuff until further progress is made. The blacklisting thing is a bit scary but I have never clicked on"this is spam" in hotmail on something I know I had subscribed to.. but there is no accounting for daft people I guess
I had the same problems some months ago and I signed with YMLP following retro64 advice. After one week I found that the site was down for a few hours: but after that short downtime, I never experienced it again and I must say that I'm quite happy for their service!
Well, call them daft or retarded or whatever you want but the reality is that some of them WILL click it and that, in turn, will hurt your business unless you're going through an approved email provider. We use www.constantcontact.com and have been very happy with the results. They have nice tracking tools and we get a report of people who clicked "this is spam" and those who opted out so we don't bother those people next month...
4. Your hosting provider can decide to disable or drop your account based on outgoing mail activity. It happened to me because the forum software I used sent e-mail notifications for new posts (like this one does). I was incorrectly judged to be spamming and got locked out of my account for "violating my user agreement". The matter was never really resolved. My site was just ungracefully shut down for a month while I got set up on a new hosting provider. -Erik
What Retro said is true and correct. If you still want to do it yourself, then you can by getting whitelisted (with AOL especially) through the various postmasters of the different websites. You can also use more than one IP (not in the same range) - one for your newsletters and one for your business to keep from shutting everything down if something goes astray. BTW, AOL's own email to members gets put into their spam folder because using that button is SO easy! Never underestimate what people will do regardless of logic arguing to the contrary! -JPG
Ok, Ok.. I'm convinced (I'm never too stuborn to see where problems can arise) it all makes sense now. At this time I personally can not change anything, but I will definatly be looking into using "proper" mailing services in time. Thanks for pointing it out. To the OP > I suppose you now have your answer
If you decide to send mail from your own dedicated server, be sure you first have a reverse DNS record established for your IP address. AOL blacklisted my domain until I asked my service provider to set this up for me. Besides AOL, a couple other email servers will also reject mail unless if comes from an IP with a valid reverse DNS record. This is something your service provider must setup for you, you cannot do it yourself.
Mark's right. You cannot get whitelisted from AOL without reverse DNS set up. While you're at it, make sure you have a subject line and also a "nick name" in the from field. that is make sure it is sent from "Your Name" <you@yourdomain.com> as these will cause spam filters to block your message. I'm sure there are other spam "tells" and I'd love to hear them too. -JPG
We use a mailer program called Gammadyne and use it's throttle settings to send slowly to hotmail, yahoo, aol, etc to avoid greylisting. Takes about 7 days to get our newletter out running on 2 servers. Pushing the limit, going to have to migrate over to something else soon. AOL blocked us then got on phone and setup for a feedback loop. Now we get reports and remove them from the list. Yes valid reverse DNS records are very good.
Arcade, We use Gammadyne too and have several licenses (it is pretty inexpensive considering all its features) so we use several machines to send newslettees out in a timely manner. If you are whitelisted, then I do not think you need to throttle. I'm pretty sure we don't. -JPG
I agree with Mike here. A decent, secure and stable service is what you need and YMLP is all of that. It's not free but it will definitely prevent future headaches. Didier