Recommendations for a mailing list host?

March 14, 2006 12:40 PM

Does anyone have a good mailing list company to recommend for a big weekly e-mail newsletter? I send a plaintext e-mail newsletter to a mailing list of 25,000 or so double-opt-in subscribers - mailing them 10-15k of plaintext every week or two - and my current host of several years - Sparklist - is giving me billing trouble. My hosting fee used to be less $100 a month and now they're charging $500 or more. I'm looking for a new company to send out the list, give me a control panel to add and remove subscribers, and give a price closer to $100/month than $500.

Note that I'm looking for a company to give me online access to send/manage subscribers ... I'm not looking to run this myself with listserv, majordomo, or some other app that I'd run myself.

posted by mark7570 to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

My organization's been astoundingly happy with ConstantContact. Reasonable prices, non-profit discounts, and helpful phone staff if you ever need it.
posted by piro at 12:53 PM on March 14, 2006

We've been happy with Campaign Monitor -- their fee schedule is $5 / mailing + $0.01 / list recipient.
posted by gac at 12:57 PM on March 14, 2006

If you're looking for an ASP solution, I thought the folks at Emma were super nice. Their product is definitely geared towards the design agency/non-profit crowd. I've also heard good things about MailChimp.
posted by junkbox at 1:09 PM on March 14, 2006

I have a lot of experience with Constant Contact as a web designer and my clients love it. I have also heard good things about something called Vertical Response.
posted by traderjoefan at 1:10 PM on March 14, 2006

Thirding Constant Contact. My boss switched to this service recently and she raves about how much better it is than our former one (sorry, not sure what that one was).
posted by katie at 1:19 PM on March 14, 2006

What about Got Marketing?
posted by wordwhiz at 2:48 PM on March 14, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks, all - I've heard great things about Constant Contact as well, and my team has also consulted to them on their user experience. My only issue, for my newsletter, is that I don't think they support plaintext - they're HTML all the way.
posted by mark7570 at 8:10 PM on March 14, 2006

With the volume that you're looking at, along with the fact that it's plaintext, I'd recommend contacting SwiftPage Email. They offer low rates and if you ever go to HTML, they accomodate very easily.

Disclaimer: I work for a company that has a product supporting the SwiftPage platform for HTML.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 4:28 AM on March 15, 2006

They do support plain text. The preview window has 2 tabs, one for HTML and one for plain text. You can also enter different information in each.
posted by traderjoefan at 8:35 AM on March 15, 2006