Mailchimp alternatives

December 1, 2017 12:21 PM

What's a good alternative to Mailchimp for a *non-marketing* email list of a few hundred people getting a daily note with attachments?

I'm setting up a paid subscription daily email newsletter that will likely stay under 1000 recipients for the foreseeable future (it's a very niche subject). It must include large PDF attachments (1-5mb) and I want them to be attachments, not links.

So I'd like the responsive formatting, tracking and list management of Mailchimp (which I obviously don't get just BCCing everyone in a regular email) but without any of their marketing features or restrictions (e.g. on attachments). I think something like TinyLetter might not be enough.

I'm not a programmer, though I would hire one to customize a solution if necessary. But it should be efficient for a non-programmer to draft and send these letters every day.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

posted by neat graffitist to Technology (7 answers total)

I used to work in email management software. You will likely not find something that allows you to send out mass emails with attachments. The reason why is that many mail providers (like Google) are pretty aggressive about marking something as spam that gets sent out programmatically and also contains attachments. Since being marked as spam by Google and the like is disastrous for any email management system, they generally will not allow you to send messages with attachments.
posted by Ragged Richard at 1:30 PM on December 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

Maybe Send Grid, which can also be used with an email client?
posted by foxfirefey at 2:08 PM on December 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

I would add a link to an attachment download page on a website. There are ways to make your link download the file automatically when clicked. As said, emails with attachments will get sent to spam. (And I would find an emailed attachment sketchy.)
posted by Crystalinne at 2:45 PM on December 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Constant Contact
posted by SemiSalt at 4:46 PM on December 1, 2017

instead of attachment, could you link to the file(s) on a google drive? this way you can use mail chimp.
posted by pyro979 at 8:00 PM on December 1, 2017

Mailgun, which I've used for a project before, supports attachments. You'd likely need a programmer to help you set things up, as it only provides an API for sending messages and it doesn't have all the nice front-end-UI bits that something like MailChimp has.
posted by Aleyn at 12:19 AM on December 2, 2017

Smore allows attachments for paid plans. It's easy to create beautiful newsletters. No programming skills required to use.

I've also used Mailgun, Postmark and SendGrid. These are programmer friendly and more suitable when integrating into a custom solution.

Mailgun and Postmark are for 'Transactional email' only.

They provide access via SMTP so you could use an email client, though I'm not sure if that helps when sending to a list of 100 contacts.

Postmark stands out regarding deliverability: they track and share stats about email reaching Inbox vs Spam for top email account providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc).

The max attachment size is typically about 25-30Mb with most services. That's usually the email contents plus attachments. Compress the attachments to avoid that being a problem.
posted by weissed at 8:20 AM on December 8, 2017 [1 favorite]