...and so does Arpreach, a program installed on your own server. I've set up integration with that, but haven't started using it live yet. It looks as though it's going to work very nicely, though.
Ive run listmail (self hosted system) on some sites, but if i had it to do over, I would have used aweber or similar from the start. David
That's certainly something to worry about. I switched from Autoresponseplus (Arpreach's predecessor) to Aweber, even though I found Aweber much clunkier and it's missing some features I appreciated in Autoresponseplus, because delivery rates had gone right down. I'm planning now on migrating to Arpreach. It allows you to set up with external SMTP providers - you can try different ones out, test them against each other, and hopefully get good delivery rates. That's the theory. It's going to mean work, of course, but for me I think it'll be worth it for the added features and flexibility about double opt-in.
IMO the best email marketing solution is Interspire Email Marketer. Self hosted, with amazing options, autoresponders and even split-testing. Set it up on a different hosting with its own unique IP address. However, I'm interested to hear why David would have started with aWeber...
I'm not an expert at setting up servers or preventing email from going into spam. I'd rather leave that to a 3rd party. Also when sending out email, it seems to put a lot of stress on the server, cpu loads shoot up and the site slows down. Some hosts only allow XXX per hour. So if you have a list of say 10k, you arent going to get your email out very quickly. Why i would have done it from the beginning? many people wont bother to do a double opt in long after they signed up for your site- on the initial signup, they are more likely. Also, aweber raised their pricing after I started, couldve gotten grandfathered in under a much better fee structure. David
I don't know about the message above (looks like spam) but for anything up to 40,000 emails a month you can do just fine with self-installed software (yea, Interspire one isn't bad at all) and a SendGrid.com account tied into it on a VPS (at the very least, to avoid emails per hour limits that most shared hosting accounts have... plus, would you really host a site that gets a lot of traffic on a shared host? Geez...) Aweber, Mailchimp and other services can get pretty costly once you get into 10,000+ subscribers... and even though I would trust them as well, if you've got the budget, if the cost of it all is your main concern you can do all of that easily and reliably for much less for bigger lists on your own.