I'm planning on offering an opt-in e-mail newsletter that gets sent to my current customers, strictly for the purpose of announcing updates and new products. I'm looking for something that can import address lists from the usual sources (Excell, Access, CSV, etc) and it can totally automate the subscribe/unsubscribe/distribution process. Can anyone recommend a good app that handles such things? Obviously cheaper is better, but I'd rather spend a few more dollars on something that works well and can potentially meet my needs down the road (whatever those are), too.

There's a program called groupmail pro by infacta that can do those sorts of things. I personally dont like sending out my own newsletters. Having tried both I prefer to use a product like YMLP.com

- Steve

I use Ezine Director, and it works very well. Clean, functional web interface. Nice set of features. It is free for small lists, and affordable for larger ones.

http://ezinedirector.com/

I just use my own PHP script and works for the small amount of mail i send (200 mails at most right now). It uses the web server's smtp. It's nothing fancy; the only really neat feature is that I can select the type of mail I am sending (newsletter, beta announcement, etc) and it figures out from the user database who has is supposed to receive it (ie. some people choose not to receive newsletter, some mail is only meant for specific groups like developers). I have no clue if it'll scale and work fine for 1000+ users though, so I would be interested in hearing if this is a smart or dumb idea.