Ask HN: What newsletter software do you use?
I looked into Campaign monitor and Newsberry, but both seem a bit steep. $10 per campaign is not cheap.
What services could you recommend?
What services could you recommend?
Also, we tag each email sent with a synthetic key to a table that stores the specific email address and time it was sent. This way we can do stats on effects of time-of-day of sending on conversion rates, etc. Not that we're actually doing those stats.
Also, it's surprisingly easy to do mass emails and campaigns with a little perl or python and {sendmail || your_favorite_MTA}
Some of the services are really good and easy to use if you are only sending a few, though. I've heard good things about Constant Contact.
If you're sending more than 200 messages to the big 4 (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL) take the time to REGISTER with them first and tell them about your messaging habits. Do not change the from FROM field ever! Try to minimize content changes between messages; rewrite the URLs in message bodies for tracking purposes. Don't send a message to an unverified mailbox. Make sure your users consent to receiving your message and you have a way to prove this (a check box on the post sign up screen.) Do not use a misbehaving SMTP server that doesn't accept returned messages and other housekeeping communication; gmail will say "message undeliverable" the first time around and look back at you to see if you acknowledge this, or it might not confirm delivery for a while, to see if you're a phantom smtpd who would disappear after an hour. Get DomainKeys, SPF and other credentials you need. Do all your mailing from ONE domain name, mail.example.com and make sure you have backup servers as well.
Good luck.
P.S. Postfix has various mailing list and newsletter management addons. Qmail was written JUST for that purpose.
If you're looking for a hosted solution that isnt too expensive Aweber is nice.