Easiest way to send mass emails?

June 22, 2023 4:21 PM

I'm taking over the mailing list for a local hobby group I help organize. How can I set up an email list for about 350 people that a) members can subscribe to or unsubscribe from on their own, b) only a small number of people have permission to send to, and c) does not require the group to have a physical address?

Right now the person managing the list just sends an email with their personal email address and BCCs everyone, but our list is getting too long to manage that way, and it also means that each person on the list needs to ask us to subscribe or unsubscribe them.

This is not a discussion forum. Whoever owns the list needs to be able to send out announcements, but we don't want people to be able to reply and start discussions. Ideally I could give 1-5 other people access to send to the list, but it's okay if it's only me who is allowed.

We looked into Mailchimp and other free email campaign software but it requires a physical mailing address to comply with anti-spam regulations. We're an informal hobby group and don't have a mailing address for the group. None of us is comfortable using our home address, for privacy reasons.

I believe there are about 350 people on the list currently. (Though I also suspect that a large number of them would unsubscribe if given the option; we really only have about ~50 people I'd consider to be "active" in our group.) That makes us too big for a free groups.io account.

Is the best option just for us to get a PO Box so we can use a service like Mailchimp? Or is there another solution I haven't thought of?

posted by capricorn to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I think you could probably use Google Groups for this. People should be able to subscribe and unsubscribe on their own, although it'll be a little clunkier than with something like Mailchimp, and you can definitely restrict posting a specific set of users. It's hard to tell from their documentation what features do and don't require a paid Google Business plan, but it's definitely possible to create a [e-mail] group with just a basic Gmail/Google account. I'm in some groups that have over 1000 members, so group size shouldn't be an issue.
posted by duien at 4:46 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Honestly, Mail Chimp is so extremely easy to use, both for you and for the recipients, that I'd spring for the cheapest mailbox at your local UPS store or other mail drop location. (I'm a person who did 2 stretches running email newsletters a while back and there's no question that Mail Chimp was the simplest by far, though this was a few years ago.)
posted by BlahLaLa at 4:57 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Groups.io has filled the niche of the old yahoo groups, and does a good job with medium sized mailing lists, if the price is within reason for this.
posted by nickggully at 5:09 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

We use Google Groups for this and have for about a decade. Does everything you want, zero headaches, and does everything you want it to do. One list I'm on has thousands of subscribers, so no worries about list size.
posted by anastasiav at 6:37 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

You might look into buttondown.email which seems fairly reasonable for what you're doing; $9/mo for 1000 subscribers (half price for not-for-profits). There's also a list of links to comparisons with other options at the bottom of the page, which you could look through.
posted by Superilla at 6:42 PM on June 22, 2023

Response by poster: Thanks all! Follow-up question on Google Groups: will our members need to have a Gmail address or Google account to receive emails? Not all our members are very tech savvy, and some might be confused or frustrated by the process of signing up for Google.
posted by capricorn at 7:02 AM on June 23, 2023

For Google Groups, from what I can tell, while they don't need a GMail address, they will need a Google Account associated with the email address they want to use.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they do listserv-style mailing lists (which didn't require anything but an email account somewhere) anymore. Such is the price of free, I suppose.
posted by Aleyn at 3:00 PM on June 23, 2023