Hi guys:

I have spent many hours researching the best way to handle the Retro64 newsletter, and I thought I would share my findings. It may save you some time and trouble.

My first attempt at a newsletter was to write a php script to log all entered emails to a text file and I purchased a pc program to send the newsletter out. This proved to take far too much time and effort to send out the newsletter.

Attempt #2:
This time I used the very popular "YourMailingListProvider". Their service works very well, and while there are no ads in the newsletter you send out, the user is presented with an ad when they sign up. I was not willing to use ymlp for that reason.

Attempt #3:
This time I installed the very excellent "Mojo" mailing list software on my server. *Excellent* package, totally pro. However I was not comfortable sending out that many emails from the Retro64 server. All it would take is one or two cranky people, who forgot they signed up, to cause problems with my isp. And for some reason, sending out newsletters from the main web server just didn't feel "right"

Attempt #4: bingo!
I searched far and wide for a good, easy, newsletter service that was both reliable, and didn't cost a fortune to use. Many of these services are ridiculously expensive, as much as 10 cents per email!

A few months ago, I finally found a provider that met all my needs, and charged only 1 dollar per thousand emails. This service is called Ezine Manager, http://www.ezinemanager.com. It was simple to set up and use, highly reliable, and has a good reputation with many high profile clients. Their control panel is very detailed and you can get all kinds of great info and stats. It handles bouncing and all that other stuff too, of course.


I know I sound like a commercial, but I am not affiliated with them in any way, shape, or form. I am just so happy that I finally found a good service that I wanted to share! :-)

Same here. I've just joined up with ezinemanager and they are great! The interface is very clean and adding the email signup form to your web page is very simple. I'd recommend them also, though I've only sent out one newsletter so far with their services.

I've signed up with them as well and so far so good. The only thing I don't like is that there's a minimum processing fee per month. That would be fine if I mailed my list every month, but some months I skip and end up eating the cost.

- Steve

Sounds interesting. What's the monthly minimum for the service?

It's about 12$ or so... I think 12.50 to be exact. But then there are different rates when you actually send based on the number of emails.

One nice feature they have is that they can code all your links to go through ezinemanager and then they report stats to you. So for instance if you have a link for a new game that was released you can see that 5000 of 15000 people clicked that link to check out the new game. The downside is that the urls themselves look a little obfuscated in your email, but that can be got around by using html format if you're willing to not do simple text.

I think it's $12.50 per month for anything less than 12500 emails sent out. After you use up the 12,500, it goes to 1$ per thousand emails sent.

Another thing I like is that they have been slowly adding features. This month they added custom headers and footers for the subscribe/unsubscribe pages. They also give you a custom address to send mails to for subscribing. I'd rather go that route because then the user never even leaves my site when they subscribe. However, I can't seem to get php to properly set the "Return Path" header item.

-Very informative and helpful post Mike. :)

It seems like a good service.

I have one question, though. Do they guarantee that they won't sell the email addresses on your list to spammers?

Originally posted by Norbyte
It seems like a good service.

I have one question, though. Do they guarantee that they won't sell the email addresses on your list to spammers?

They do guarantee that, yes.