OT - Software or Service to Email Newsletters

[Davidm]

Slight OT, but may have a diy angle, and some people here may have some advice.

I'm a member of a local U3A (University of the Third Age) "society" and am looking for a more efficient way for us to send out News Updates. We have a quarterly Newsletter which is posted to members and vanilla version (ie without personal informatio) put on our website.

However we need to be able to email out a short (one or two page) News Update, every couple of weeks or so, to keep members up to date between the quarterly Newletters.

We currently have a membership of just under a 1000, and we are trying limit the growth to maybe 5% per year at the moment. We have a membership "database" as an Excel spreadsheet, structured so that names and email addresses are easily extracted.

I've googled bulk email software and services but it's nearly all high end stuff suitable for business doing marketing campaigns, a bit OTT for our needs.

We are currently using gmail and mailmerge, but it's very agricultural and unreliable. I've used Thunderbird for small mailmerge and mailouts but it's quite slow and an ISP might get a bit stroppy with 1000 going out.

Anyone have experience of this sort of thing that they can share and give me some ideas where to investigate further, or even where else I can ask this question?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Mentalguy2k8]

If you've got your own website (hosting) there are plenty of free scripts available (try hotscripts.com ) from simple scripts to advanced ones. You can administer the whole thing from a web page, plus you could add a page to your site where members can opt in or out to the mailing list.

There's a lot of pretty simple PHP scripts out there which would probably be ideal.

[Mentalguy2k8]

Should have added, if you pay for web hosting, some hosting packages include a range of free scripts (including mail lists) & you can add them to your site with just a few clicks.

[Davidm]

I should have made clear, our website is provided and hosted by the national "owner" of all local U3A groups, and emailing is not provided.

[Harry Bloomfield]

on 30/11/2012, Davidm supposed :

If you need just basic text, you could set up a Yahoo group. Get everyone to join it, but restrict posting to the groups owner.

[Mike Barnes]

Davidm :

I do something similar for a charity using MailChimp. It's free for up to 2000 addresses. You can copy your Excel spreadsheet to the clipboard and paste it straight into their web page for upload.

[Brian Gaff]

This may have been suggested already, but just in case. How about a mailing list from someone like freelists? With you as the only person with posting rights and the folk with internet access subscribed to the list.

Brian

[David WE Roberts]

In the longer term you might like to consider taking over the hosting of the local U3A website. You probably have a few IT Literates amongst the membership who could take this on.

Hint - use a well known web site building software package (we used Joomla) which puts the basic site together for you and just requires you to add local content. There will be someone who can code web sites in their own style of HTML but this usually results in a site which is unmaintainable by anyone else. Which is why we had to replace it.

An ISP which hosts Joomla is a useful starting point because they, will understand any issues you have. These hosting sites also usually provide email as part of the package, and your web package will have bulk email tools.

Look at

for the site we built ( a while since I was involved).

HTH

Dave R

[fred]

In article , Mike Barnes writes

solution but I haven't liked the few mailchimp based mailouts that I have received, I felt they had a spammy feel to them and for professional mailings I didn't want server names with 'chimp' in the links going out under our banner ;-).

We use MaxBulk Mailer which runs locally and handles composition, formatting, batch/scheduled sending and logging well. Not free (currently 50quid I think) but worth the money in my view.

It does list management too but the lists aren't exportable so a worthless feature in my view, my only gripe with the program

[Davidm]

SNIPPED

Thanks Fred. I agree with your comments about mailchimp! I've had a quick look at MaxBulk Mailer, well just at their website. It looks like it just uses your exisiting ISP/mail service. Have you had any problems with your email provider restricting the sending out of bulk emails? David

[fred]

In article , Davidm writes

Sorry David, missed your reply so don't know if you're still watching the thread.

Yes, it uses your existing mail provision.

The location where this setup is used has a pretty shitty ISP and we use a separate mail provider. The ISP blocks port 25 (SMTP) traffic but the mail provider accepts mail traffic on an alternate port that the ISP doesn't block. The mail provider has a limit of 1000 emails per account per hour.

The MaxBulk software can set up your mailshot to send out the release at whatever rate you wish. eg you can set a release of 1000 entries to go out in batches of 20 (or whatever) with a programmed delay between batches of say 5, 30mins or an hour. You can also schedule the release to start at any time so if you have a really fussy ISP/mail provider you could kick the release off at midnight and let it spend all night over it.

If it stalls overnight then the send log will let you know exactly where it stopped and if you restart it, it will not repeat the send on syccessful recipients unless you reset the send list.

[Davidm]

Thanks Fred, I've downloaded a trial of MaxBulk and had a play, it looks very good, though I've not tried actually sending emails yet. I'll have to see what my ISP allows, and also the various email providers I use.

[rodneyfox46]

Hello David I am looking for a solution for my local 1100 member U3A for exactly the problem you raised. What did you finally select and implement to handle your bulk emailing? Some other local U3As seem to have gone to Mailchimp. Was there a reason you rejected mailchimp (if you did, that is!) regards Rodney Fox

[Peter Parry]

In 2012 it might not have been what it is now. Now it is perfectly adequate.

[Brian-Gaff]

One of the issues I have with email newsletters is that many of them are pointless, as they end up just a collection of links so you have to be on line to read them, and also because they are link based, its often hard to get back to the index easily. In my view, if you want an email newsletter it should be just plain text with all the required information in it and not any link to online bits and pieces. I had one the other day, done in Mail Chimp that basically was a collection of headings and links. If you wanted to find anything useful out it meant spending time clicking through all sorts of stuff and like and other links and general detritus to read what, in the old days was just text which required no intervention at all.

So as in this thread its the u3a you could find some members are not up to speed with internet stuff. many I know just use email and do not browse or use smart phones. they can also often have failing sight as well, so keep it simple and keep people happy is my feeling. Brian