Weekly Emails

January 26, 2005 10:33 AM

I'm looking for a way to send a weekly email to a list of members of a nonprofit organization I work for. (+)

What I want to be able to do is be able to send a single message from my home office to an email address on my office server (NT server, Microsoft Exchange), and have the server in turn send it out to a text list of email addresses. Basically a glorified .forward file.

I don’t need anything fancy, like many of the list processing software packages I’ve seen – recipients don’t need to be able to change settings to their accounts or anything like that. Being able to get a single report of bounced emails would be nice, but not necessary.

Oh, and since our server is an ancient, steam-driven machine, it would be nice if it sent out the messages in batches rather than all at once, so that everyone’s access to the Internet didn’t basically shut down for an hour while it the newsletter was being sent.

We’ve just been using the BCC: field for a long time, but with 3000+ addresses, that’s getting unwieldy.

posted by Framer to computers & internet (7 comments total)

why not just yahoo groups?
posted by petebest at 11:38 AM on January 26, 2005

oh. 3000+. Right. sorry for the too-quick reply.
posted by petebest at 11:39 AM on January 26, 2005

You might want to look into going with a third party remailing service. One of the nonprofits I work with has had great success with eROI.
posted by SpecialK at 11:42 AM on January 26, 2005

Mailman list hosting somewhere?

Do you have a budget for this?
posted by madman at 1:08 PM on January 26, 2005

I've had great success with ActiveCampaign's 1-2-All PHP-based mailing list management software. Easy to install (ActiveCampaign will even install it for you at no charge, I believe), and YOU own it once you plunk down the $99 it costs.

Versus the subscription-based services I've used to the same end, 1-2-All is a lot less finicky, and lacks the restrictive anti-spammer safeguards that many of the services put in place.
posted by killdevil at 1:28 PM on January 26, 2005

Thanks, everyone.

madman: no budget per se. We're willing to spend a bit for software upfront, but don't want to use one of the big places like Protus that charge per-email.
posted by Framer at 6:02 PM on January 26, 2005

Here are a few mass mailers:

The one I use, that is pretty good:
Group Mail

Another that I've heard good things about and is less expensive:
HotcastMailer
posted by gus at 7:32 AM on January 27, 2005