Mass-mailing Software

Factual Questions
1

Before you nuke me:

I’ve been working part-time for a software company. We’re looking for a piece of software that will let us send emails to our users with announcements of bugfixes, security vulnerabilities, and so on. I’m trying to find something that will let me specify the emails in a simple text file (one address per line), type the email, and send it. I’ve looked at mailing list managers, but they all seem to focus on discussion-type lists, not announcements. Everything else I’ve found seems like a spam tool.

Does anyone know of some decent, free software for doing this?

I don’t want anything web-based (or even anything that requires it be run on a mail server, like Majordomo) because we don’t have one to spare.

2

Majordomo and some system like that would be the thing to use here but you can always just make a text file and then copy/paste it into the BCC field of most mail programs. Outlook and Outlook Express work this way.

3

We’ve found that both of those don’t behave well when doing that: they freeze, send multiple copies, skip addresses, garble the message, etc.

And as I said, majordomo isn’t an option.

4

That’s bizarre.

Are you sure its Outlook screwing it up and not an upstream mail server?

5

Try www.arrowemail.com Some of our clients use it, and no complaints. I think one client has 6000 addresses.

6

You might try a simple bash script feeding sendmail. You can’t get much simpler or free-er.