How do I send mass mailings?

March 16, 2009 1:14 PM

Mass mailing software for PR purposes: the trees, the forest, and which is which.

Typing in "mailing solutions pr" or similar queries lead to massive results, but it's not always clear if they're reliable and such. So I thought I'd take this up with you people.

We're looking for a mailing solution (hosted on our server or to be used on in house pc), that can address several hundreds of contacts. It must also be able to categorize contacts in various flexible ways, as in: "business press", "leisure and travel press", "all press" etc etc. It also has to be (as) cheap (as possible). Anyone?

posted by NekulturnY to computers & internet (7 answers total)

PHPList is perfect for your purposes but has a fairly steep learning curve. Dadamail is pretty good too. Both are free.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 1:30 PM on March 16, 2009

Salesforce
posted by KokuRyu at 1:31 PM on March 16, 2009

I don't recommend free mailing list products. The onus is on you, the user, to actually send through the mailing list and there is little chance that you will be able to adjudicate if you are labeled a spammer. It's much smarter to go through a service that is already trusted by the majority of ISPs.
posted by parmanparman at 1:53 PM on March 16, 2009

Unless you have people in house who are capable of handling the white listing process, you may be better served by a hosted solution with pricing that will fit better with the needs of a smaller list. I tend to push people towards Constant Contact unless they're really in need of the tools and service offered by a top tier mailer like Lyris, which come at a premium.

Bringing mailing in house for a few hundred records will likely be overkill.
posted by paxton at 3:05 PM on March 16, 2009

The best advice I can give you is to not try to do this on your own server. It's not worth the trouble - and believe me, it can be a lot of trouble.

If you must, here's a reasonably great package:

http://dadamailproject.com/

But you'll make your life (and that of your subscribers & unsubscribers) a lot easier with one of these hosted solutions:

http://madmimi.com/

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ (for tight integration with online applications)

http://mailchimp.com
posted by subpixel at 5:36 PM on March 16, 2009

Echoing Salesforce, which then gives you a mountain of other tools for tracking results from your outbound messaging.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 6:50 PM on March 16, 2009

I use Outlook's "mail merge" (yeah, I know, a very basic tool that cannot be easily automated), and I always get in trouble with the IT guy, who says we will be blacklisted.
posted by KokuRyu at 12:18 AM on March 17, 2009