Suggestions for good newsletter software?

I’m looking for some web-based newsletter software for sending out daily newsletters (both text and HTML.) Ideally, something I can host myself. Anyone have suggestions? (Mark suggests the excellent CampaignMonitor, but a penny a subscriber per email is too rich for a daily email.)

Posted on 26 January '06 by Amit Gupta, under Asides, Technology.

10 Comments to “Suggestions for good newsletter software?”

#1 Posted by Greg (26.01.06 at 19:59 )

Drupal + Newsletter module.

Enjoy!

There’s even utilities for loading your Wordpress content into Drupal
http://drupal.org/node/10900

#2 Posted by Amit Gupta (26.01.06 at 20:03 )

Thanks for the suggestions, Greg. Is the UI any good? I want non techies to be able to use it without training. (I’d rather not use drupal for the site, is it worth using it just for the newsletter?)

#3 Posted by John Gray (26.01.06 at 23:22 )

Freshmeat is your friend. http://freshmeat.net/. I haven’t used any of them so can’t vouch for them, but PHPList or Dada Mail look like good bets.

Go, Lazyweb!

#4 Posted by Amit Gupta (27.01.06 at 00:23 )

Thanks, John. I’ll check out PHPList and Dada Mail. My friend Arthur just suggested Constant Contact. Anyone know anything about them?

#5 Posted by Amit Gupta (27.01.06 at 15:13 )

Some research follow-up:

Constant Contact’s pricing looks reasonable for a daily newsletter (monthly by subscribers instead of by email sent.) Creative Good worked with them, and Cat tells me their interface is top-notch. She also mentions Jango Mail as one of their only competitors that looks good. Jango looks decent to me, but given that the pricing is by email, it’s not going to work for a daily newsletter.

So it looks like Constant Contact is the winner for a hosted solution for a daily newsletter, and CampaignMonitor’s probably the best hosted solution for infrequent mailings.

As for solutions you host yourself, PHPList and Dada Mail both look promising. Dada has some great design philosophy and has been around for a while, but only allows for the collection of one field (email) per subscriber (no name, etc.). This is set to change in a beta version due Feb 14th, says the author. PHPList doesn’t seem to have the same focus on usability as Dada, but is a bit more functional… Neither seems as perfect a solution as Constant Contact or CampaignMonitor, so I’ll keep looking.

#6 Posted by Andrew (27.01.06 at 18:43 )

Try http://www.intellicontact.com/ I think its a subscription service.

#7 Posted by Richard (25.04.06 at 09:21 )

http://freshmeat.net/projects/phpmynewsletter/

#8 Posted by Amit Gupta (25.04.06 at 12:18 )

An update: I tried out Constant Contact and CampaignMonitor. Found them both to be pretty easy to use, though not as flexible as I wanted. CampaignMonitor was clearly the better-desigend of the two.

I then installed PHPMail, which was kind of a disaster. After tweaking settings and configuration for a couple days, I was still having trouble getting mail to actually leave my server. I gave up.

Finally, I installed Dadamail. It worked, and it still working. Pretty easy to setup, pretty easy to use. Doesn’t have all the features I’d like (there’s a pay add-on that I will probably get that adds a few more) but it does everything I need.

Richard: Thanks for the recommendation! I looked at PHPmynewsletter earlier, but it appeared to lack some features I needed. In particular, being able to source the HTML for a newsletter directly from a webpage.

#9 Posted by Geoff C (21.05.06 at 17:58 )

poMMo looks promising. I’m going to evaluate it vs. Dada Mail.

http://www.iceburg.net/pommo/index.php/Main_Page

#10 Posted by Aradhana (20.07.09 at 10:22 )

http://drupal.org/project/constant_contact

This is a drupal module to provide integration with constant contact.

you may find it useful.








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