Newsletter Blues - Mon, 7 Jan 2008

Happy New Year everyone! I’ve worked hard and really customized Wordpress to look and work exactly as I’d like. It’s ready to go as soon as I get the rest of the site up.

One of the next tasks was to replace the mailing software that I was using to send out my Behold News to people who had purchased or downloaded Behold. You might have noticed that you didn’t receive a mailing for my last version in November. I didn’t send one out because I had problems back in August with my mailings. My software kept shutting down every few hundred people and I’d have to restart it quite a few times. I wasn’t sure if everyone had received it, and I’m sure some people received it twice. I didn’t want that to happen again, so I didn’t send one out in November.
 

I was thinking of switching to phpList to be my mailing program. But in the last couple of days, I found out the real problem and phpList wouldn’t be any better than Spd E-Letter would.
 

There are three ways of sending Mass Mailings:

1. From a program running on your website. This is what Spd E-Letter and phpList do. What I discovered the trouble here is that webhosts limit the number of mailings you are allowed to make in an hour. This is to prevent spamming. My number of mailings is now getting large enough that it would take quite a number of hours to send them all out at the limits they allow. If I had 10 times the list size, it would take days. So this is no longer a solution for me for the future.
    
2. From a program running on your computer. Unfortunately this has the same problem. The limit instead is imposed by the ISP who you get Internet service from.
    
3. From a company on the web that provides e-mailing services. This appears to be my only option. My research indicates the way to go is to stick to one of the top two: AWeber or GetResponse

So at least for now, I don’t have to worry about trying to implement phpList along with everything else I’m doing to get the new site up. But what I may do when I get my next version of Behold out, is try out both AWeber and GetResponse each with half my people and see which I like better.

But next it’s off to Vanilla and finishing up the rest of my “new” site.