Sidebar to: How to Develop an E-Mail Newsletter
A mailing list program must be able quickly to e-mail the newsletter to many addresses. Ideally, the program automatically takes care of subscribe and unsubscribe requests which become burdensome as the list grows.
You have several options when setting up a newsletter, depending on the size of your subscription list.
1. Run a list manually from your e-mail program. Be sure to put the names in the Bcc: field so the whole list isn't visible to the recipients.
2. Use an e-mail merge program to mail from your database and desktop computer. Some of these are:
Campaign from Arial Software http://www.arialsoftware.com
Microsoft Office 97 (Word, Outlook, and Access) http://www.microsoft.com/office/
NetMailer from Alpha Software http://www.alphasoftware.com/netmailer/
These work well for smaller lists, but can take hours to send e-mail over a dial-up connection, and still require manual list maintenance for subscribes and unsubscribes.
3. Ask your Web hosting service. Many Web hosting services will set up a Majordomo mailing list for a nominal charge of $10 to $25 per month, or may include it in their services for no extra charge at all. Majordomo is a popular program since it's freeware. It is not for the faint-hearted, however. Read our article on "Majordomo Newsletters for the Novice." http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/majordomo.htm
4. Set up a mailing list program on your server. If you have an in-house server, you can do about anything you want. Some Web hosting services may also give you telnet permissions so you can set up majordomo yourself if you know how. Verio Web Hosting, for example, makes it moderately easy to install Majordomo on their virtual servers for no extra charge. http://www.iserver.com/support/contrib/majordomo/
5. Hire a third party firm to serve your mailing list. Some of these which are able to handle larger lists include:
6. Set up a free newsletter on a service such as ListBot (http://www.listbot.com). Your subscribers need to fill out some demographic information (which may slow the subscription rate), and will see ads on your newsletter from ListBot's advertisers, but you get a free newsletter.
