I manage the weekly email announcements for a registered non-profit music club. The email only goes to people who sign up to receive it. When I took over the mailing it used gmail, but after the list went over 500 people gmail started putting restrictions on it and wouldn’t send it out as a single mailing.
I switched to my personal U-verse account, but after list topped 1000, restrictions kicked in and I had to divide the list up into a dozen smaller mailings. Obviously a more appropriate type of email service is needed, but I’m not sure what that would be. The email list is now up to about 1200, and could reach 2000 in a couple of years.
I’m looking at the cheap (approx. $5 a month) web-hosting outfits like Go-Daddy, Green Geeks, and Host Gator, but thought I’d solicit some Humble Opinions before enrolling anywhere.
Beyond the email list, I’d probably eventually set up a low-tech small business site for myself using the same service, but that’s a secondary consideration.
Thanks for the quick responses. The LISTSERV concept is probably a no-go as it seems to require a fixed address, which my u-verse account doesn’t provide.
Convio -$200 a month- is serious overkill. Constant Contact -$15 a month- looks like a decent marketing tool, but if the $5 providers would work they would likely be a better fit.
(Not to be Opalesque, but the name and concept of Constant Contact seem antithetical to my organization’s desires, which are to send people the info they requested but otherwise stay the heck out of their in-box.)
I am not a remotely tech-y person, so maybe this is a dumb suggestion, but can you pull all the addresses into a distribution list, which might make it one “address” as far as Google is concerned? FWIW, that worked fine with Constant Contact (which also limits the number of addresses you can send to).
Even if you are looking to build a site in the future, what you want is a dedicated mail-sending program like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp (I prefer Mail Chimp).
It’s not a trivial task to collect addresses, create a good-looking email and reliably send the email to many people. You will do much better going with a company that specializes in something like this than going with some sort of system that is an afterthought of some existing business model (like “we host web site and oh we send mass emails too”).
The better the app the easier time you will have NOT annoying your customers. The names of the applications have nothing to do with how much mail is sent and to who. You’re in control of that. You want the app that best suits your ability to do this right.
Use a hosted service - do not attempt to use your own listserv or anything like that. You’re going to run into spam and other technical issues with stuff like that. I’ve only used MailChimp and Campaign Monitor, not Constant Contact, but they make it dead easy for you. As easy as using the SDMB. I’m advocating for a hosted service because you need something simple and quick and easy.
It turns out I’m actually at under 900 names on the list, so the Mail Chimp free service looks adequate: Up to 2000 names; up to 6000 messages a months. Hopefully the mandated Mail Chimp logo isn’t too obnoxious.
I understood that Constant Contact probably didn’t send non-stop messages. My comment was meant to be light-hearted; the name does suggest relentless Business Major badgering.
Your remark that managing a big email list is not a trivial undertaking is one I can appreciate. For one thing, I’ve come to hate auto responses: *Your message is important to me and I’ll be getting back to you very soon. * It doesn’t take a long time to select them and delete them, but they dribble in and give me too many “you’ve got mail” alerts.
Of course that only happens because I’m using a personal account for quasi-business purposes.
DianeG: It doesn’t look like gmail handles group lists any different than individual names. You can make contact lists, but the BCC line still lists all the names separately and tells you there’s a maximum of 500 recipients. And, in the past, if I habitually sent out big mailings, Google would freeze the account for a day or two.
Our conference uses Constant Contact. I’m not directly involved, but I believe they have a neat little system which inserts a 1 pixel graphic link which lets them report back to you if the mail has been opened, which can be very useful. They also have a pretty good way of letting people remove themselves from the list, which you should allow even though your recipients actively signed up.