Hi Guys,

My site/store is up and running since December, it's running on a 512 Linode but likely to need an upgrade as I'm likely to exceed the bandwith limits again this month.

At the moment I've been using MailChimp free edition to send my newsletters (a basic mail about once a week). The list of subscribers is currently about 4,000 but it's growing quickly.

If I wanted to use the paid Mailchimp service it would be $50+ a month which seems crazy when it's over twice the cost of my Linode to send some mails.

What I'm wondering is what the alternatives are. My store (Satchmo based) is set up to run with Mailman, is it feasible to set this up on my Linode and use it to send out the newsletters?

I'm guessing setting up a mailserver must be tricky if services like Mailchimp exist and cost as much as they do but as I say it seems nuts to me that sending mail would cost 2.5 time the hosting of the whole site so just wondering what the alternatives are?

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Have a read of http://library.linode.com/email/mailman ... 0.04-lucid

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You could use PHPlist. Although you will have some issues with delivery to yahoo, hotmail, and various corporate addresses because of retarded spam filter setups. It would take some skill, but you could set up PHPlist to use Amazon SES, which would result in better delivery -- I think Amazon SES is $1 per 10,000 emails.

Sending emails doesn't cost $50/month. What arguably does is fighting through various spam filters. That's the real service you're paying for. So the question is whether the occasional "Goddamn it, Hotmail, why don't you like me!?" is worth saving $50/month.

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Set up your mail server correctly and this is irrelevant.

Signing outgoing mail with DKIM and verifying your IP address with SPF will get you past spam filters like Hotmail. That and tightening up your mail server so you aren't actually sending spam without knowing it.

It's up to you if you want the hassle of trying to maintain a mailing list yourself. I have to maintain a couple of Satchmo stores myself - and using MailChimp is the easiest option in my opinion.

MailChimp offers all the statistics, the ease of sign up, minimal delivery worries, and works well. Once you switch to your own solution you'll have to spend time watching and maintaining your own servers to ensure that mail gets delivered, and start praying that your mail isn't just being delivered to some Spam folder.

If you aren't selling any products and it's just a news mailing list, then obviously the cheapest solution could be the best. However if you've got an online store and these emails are designed to get people buying from it - allocate something towards the cost of it and don't compare it to the cost of the cheapest Linode.

This is just my opinion, and obviously it doesn't really answer your question for an alternative solution.

Thanks for all the replies guys, I really appreciate them.

While it would be nice to have the reliability of a MailChimp solution, at the moment, I'd probably be willing to run the risk of not everyone getting our mails for the sake of the saving.

On the basis of growth of our newletter, we'll have over 10,000 within the next few months, with Mailchimp we'd be looking at $150 a month just for emails which is very pricey.

Would it be complicated to set up a mailserver on my Linode to send this many emails (normally one mailing a week)?

At the moment we get email addresses 2 ways, someone put's their address in a box on the homepage, this is done via mail chimp or when they place an order, they check a box saying they want to be added to our mailing list (this is added to the newsletter list in Satchmo)

It's not ideal at the moment as we have to copy/paste all the addresses in Satchmo to the MailChimp list, would obviously be a lot handier if everything could be in one place.

The Amazon option sounds interesting, it's 10c per thousand though it could be trickey to set up.

Another consideration is the cost of paying someone to set this up.

How much work (in terms of hours) would it be to implement a working solution for this?

What we are ideally looking for is a system where someone can sign up for our list, verify their address, be sent a welcome message (with discount code), and then receive our mails with the option to unsubscribe etc. It would be great if we just had a basic email template to work with where we just changed the content each week and clicked to send to all our subscribers. Hopefully it's possible to to do this for less:)

Thanks again, really appreciate your help!

[quote="AceStar"]Set up your mail server correctly and this is irrelevant.

Signing outgoing mail with DKIM and verifying your IP address with SPF will get you past spam filters like Hotmail. That and tightening up your mail server so you aren't actually sending spam without knowing it.[/quote]

I hate to bring this up every time, but this is utter nonsense. I set up everything properly and even had a nice chat with a gentleman from Yahoo! who informed that, yes, my emails were setup properly and yes, they were blocking them, and no, they wouldn't stop blocking them. Why? Because my site was not big enough to mess with.

Thanks Guys,

Deadwalrus are you saying some kind of PHPlist or DIY option would not work?

How big a site do you have to be before they take you seriously?

PHPlist do a MailChimp style hosted solution with 15,000 subscribers for $30 a month which looks better value but it's still pricey.

Any further advice would be much appreciated!

It tends to be pot luck I have small sites that send to yahoo fine.

I'd seriously consider the amazon solution since it should help with the spam problem and is cheap (I use it).

If you don't want to do it yourself you can hire someone to write a script for you, there's several people here including myself that you can hire.

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Thanks for the reply.

Roughly how big of a job would it be to set this up just to give me some idea of how it would stack up vs the Mailchimp type solution.

Thanks again

If you went down the amazon route, first I suggest reading http://aws.amazon.com/ses/

How big of a job depends on what you want it to do, at a minimum you'd probably want:

1) A database of subscribed users
2) A form where users can subscribe/unsubscribe
3) An admin area where you can edit the list content etc
4) A cron which runs periodically sending out a batch of emails (depending on your limit)
5) SPF DNS records.

I wouldn't say it's a big job.

I've never used mail chimp so can't give you a direct comparison.

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Thanks for the reply.

Had a read of the SES literature and it looks suitable.

It might be an option to send all mail out via this as it seems our order confirmations etc often end up in spam boxes.

What we are ideally looking for is a system where someone can sign up for our list, verify their address, be sent a welcome message (with discount code), and then receive our newletters with the option to unsubscribe etc. It would be great if we just had a basic email template to work with where we just changed the content each week and clicked to send to all our subscribers. We also dispatch our goods in bulk so there might be 1000+ emails to go out at once telling our customers their item is on the way.

Roughly how many hours work do you think would be involved with this (just trying to get a rough idea of what it would cost).

If you want I can contact you via your site to discuss further?

Thanks

Sent you a pm

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How to ask for help
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[quote="blobert"]Thanks Guys,

Deadwalrus are you saying some kind of PHPlist or DIY option would not work?

How big a site do you have to be before they take you seriously?

PHPlist do a MailChimp style hosted solution with 15,000 subscribers for $30 a month which looks better value but it's still pricey.

Any further advice would be much appreciated![/quote]

PHPlist works fine. It's a nice piece of software. It's just that delivery to Yahoo! etc is pretty spotty if you just send it from your Linode.

> How big do you have to get before they take you seriously?

For Yahoo!? You really need to be a mail provider. I.e., gmail, hotmail, juno, aol, comcast, time warner, etc. I doubt you need to be that big, but if you provide email services to at least several thousand people, they will probably consider adding you. If you are just sending out bulk email, they might never add you to their whitelist.

PHPlist has a plugin that allows it to work with Amazon SES, but I haven't tried setting it up. It would probably take me at least a few hours to get it up and running/tested etc.