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.