Mailing List Managers - Sendy? Self-Hosted?

[ergophobe]

I have a need to set up managing a mailing list - something I've never done - of about 14,000 email addresses. This gets pricey on Mail Chimp.

I am a bit afraid of self-hosted. I feel that sending it out from the client's underpowered shared hosting server is going to result in huge deliverability problem and could lead to various potential problems.

In looking about, I came across this
http://sendy.co/


Also cheap, but never heard of them: http://www.emailit.co/email-marketing-software-features/

Any thoughts?

[Rooftop]

We're using send grid to put a lot of stuff out now. More operational stuff rather than promotional, but it has been good. No idea how the cost stacks up using it for mailings, but delivery rates are really good.

[Chunkford]

Hosted there's https://madmimi.com/
15,000 contacts, unlimited emails + more for $59 a month.

Then there's http://www.sendblaster.com/ and http://group-mail.com/ which you could download to your desktop and use a private smtp server from somewhere like http://www.smtp.com/Solutions/SMTP-Mail-Server

There's this but your talking a lot more money and you need an smtp server as well https://www.interspire.com/emailmarketer/
but it does run on a web server.

I do like the sound of sendy.co tho

[ergophobe]

Rooftop - which plan are you on for Send Grid?

I ask b/c the low end plan has more than enough capacity for this client, but it says no DKIM customization unless you bump up a level and wonder how good the deliverability is for the default DKIM.

Thanks for all those. I came across Mad Mimmi later in the day which is pretty cheap - have you tried it?

I did start a demo on EmailIt and it's a little less polished than Mail Chimp, doesn't have an API (that I could find), but for most needs it is quite full-featured. I think it might be hard to beat for the price.

Basically Mad Mimmi and EmailIt are opposite approaches to the low end in that MM limits subscribers, but not emails, while EmailIt limits emails, but not subscribers. I think for my client, EmailIt is more attractive, because he doesn't want to mail the whole list every month, so he can load it up with 12,000 subscribers, but with just a bit of segmenting, easily stay within the 10K emails per month.

I also sent a query into Sendy. Basically it works with cURL, installed on your server but running the email server through Amazon. So in the setup in question where the MX record points to Yahoo servers and the A record to a cheap shared host, you can still run your mail through an Amazon instance.  So I guess it's somewhat like the SMTP.com offering.

Anyway, I like the long-term price on Sendy, but thinking we're still leaning toward Email It

[Rooftop]

We are on a higher plan now ergo, but we were on the basic one for a while and were happy with how it was working them. We upgraded for capacity rather than deliverability.