VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

Jeffrey Kafer · Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2007 1:31 am Post subject: email listserv?

For those of you that send out email newsletters, what service do you use to collect the addresses of your visitors and manage their subscriptions?
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Rognog · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 8:55 am Post subject:

I use ACT!. It tracks all contact info and automatically enters the email into their history.
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Jeffrey Kafer · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 10:26 am Post subject:

When sending out newsletters with ACT, does it send to your clients via your email account? I want to avoid that so my account doesn't blocked for "spamming".

I chose Google Groups. You can set up an announce-only group and they provide a handy submission form which now resides on my homepage.
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Rognog · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 10:41 am Post subject:

Yes, it does. I see what you mean about wanting to avoid spam blockers. When I send my newsletter it only gets bounced back from one or two recipients, and that's usally because the email address account no longer exists (my lazy passive way of upcating client contact info!). That and sometimes if the client's email address is "info@blahblahblah.com". Then I just call them up and get a more specific email recipient. I haven't had any other spam issues that I know of.

My Good Karma Network (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GKN) is a Yahoo Group. Is that the same as a Google Group?
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Jeffrey Kafer · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 10:45 am Post subject:

Actually my concern is not being blocked by spam filters. My fear is that by sending out too much mail, gmail will flag me as being a spammer and shut down my account. The same could happen with any email account if you send out large mailings.

Yes, the yahoo group is the same as the Google group. Except, ya know, different companies.
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ConnieTerwilliger · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 1:54 pm Post subject:

Jeff, I send out through Outlook right now in batches of 50 - very time consuming.

But as far as I understand it - 1000 or so emails is not going to tag you as a spammer unless you send to people who don't want your newsletter and they actively complain.

The spammers send out millions.
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Jeffrey Kafer · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 2:09 pm Post subject:

You're probably right, Connie. But I'd still prefer a service handle it for me. That way I don't have to micromanage my subscribes and unsubscribes.
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DaveChristi · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 3:52 pm Post subject:

Web Wiz Mailing List (for ASP/Windows web serrvers).

http://www.davechristi.com/mailing/

It handles subscribe/unsubscribe , database import, HTML e-mails, groups (for targeting specific lists), etc. The freebie works well. I was considering the paid version, but now I may be re-doing my whole site with JOOMLA Open Source CMS.

Joomla has a mass mailer built-in.
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mcm · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 5:26 pm Post subject:

I use Constant Contact. It costs money. It doesn't use your server, although there will always be ISPs or email hosts that block it even when the recipient wants it.

I like their management capabilities and their statistics.

The hosting service I use, bluehost, does allow large numbers of emails to be sent after you request an increase in your allowable emails/hour and I was planning to go that route using Dada Mail (which is free) but I was never able to get the darn thing to work.

CWToo · Guest

Another vote for ACT!

Dave · Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 8:51 am Post subject:

I use Vertical Response... quite similar to Constant Contact... but no monthly fees. Works great and manages the entire process plus has nifty keen templates or you can do your own thing.
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louzucaro · Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 1:28 pm Post subject:

My mail server has a listserv built in. It's also very easy to create subscribe / unsubscribe forms for it, or people can do it themselves with a reply.

Regardless of HOW people send out mail, though, and whether it's a single message to a single recipient or a list to 5,000 people, the two biggest problems in the e-mail landscape are:

Yahoo! (the company)
AOL users

Yahoo! will just arbitrarily, and for no really good reason, decide to block mail. This means that if you have a yahoo.com address, then you HAVE missed mail, guaranteed.

This is because Yahoo! has a ridiculous anti-spam policy that defaults to being overly aggressive and unless users take the time to learn about this policy and go through certain steps, Yahoo! considers all of this arbitrarily-blocked e-mail to actually be spam and will then block ALL mail from the server that sent the spam.

Yahoo! seems to change their default e-mail account setup from time to time, but recently, the default was for spam to get automatically DELETED (not just put in the junkmail folder). This made it impossible for users to check their junkmail and "unmark as spam" those legitimate messages that Yahoo! decided to block (for no reason).

Even when users manually changed their junkmail settings to allow them to look at and manually empty the junkmail folder, the unmark as spam feature did little, if anything, to change the minds at Yahoo! (assuming there are any) into stopping to block those senders.

In fact, I sent a message to my own Yahoo! test account, then unmarked it as spam, and then contacted Yahoo! (who didn't know that I had done this myself...they go off of some complicated statistics) who told me that there will zero users who had used "unmark as spam" on mail from my company's server.

It's awful.

With AOL, the problem is with the users themselves. Here's a fun scenario: I have a client who forwards mail from their mail account on my server to their AOL account, because they've had it since 1991 and they just LOVE AOL!!! Smile

<3

Well that's great and all, except when a spam message comes through to our server and then gets forwarded to their AOL address, they mark it as spam (rather than just deleting the message). Yeah...it came THROUGH our server. So now they've just marked their own mail server as a spammer and AOL starts blocking mail from my company's servers.

There are monkeys in Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago who have learned to use "Delete" instead of "Mark as Spam", yet for some reason after multiple explanations, some of my customers cannot figure this out.
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