google mail

[RTK]

One more thing... Don't be tempted to use a free hosted mailing list service... Many are just nets to collect emails for spam. You don't want to piss your people off... Having 3000 subscribers has real value.

Risto

[RTK]

One more thing... You could also use FeedBurner (email notifications) to communicate with your subscribers. However, (as the name implies) it uses your RSS feed, and sends out the latest additions when it's updated (daily or as it happens).

Sledger, wouldn't you manually have to managee opt-ins and opt-outs when using POP? It could be a lot of work with 1000s of subscribers.

Risto

[steve.ledger]

Assuming the 3000 recipients of Availors News Letter are 'subscribers', no.

[remi]

Hi Availor,

some webhoster don't allow to send 3,000 mails in one hour. It sounds silly, but it costs a lot of server resources, to send such masses of emails.

Another problem is, that no other recipient should see the email address of other recipients (protection of privacy). Often you'll find the tip, that you should insert the email address into the "BCC" field, in order to send them "invisible", but the consequence is, that your mails are tagged as spam by some spam-filters.

So, what you need is phplist. It's an open-source newsletter-manager with the great feature, to send masses of personalized emails bit by bit.

see also:

• Setting the Send Speed (Rate)

Regards,
Remi

[Availor]

Thanks for the replies - I know phplist but it requires importing settings which do not work well with hebrew.

I have 3500 students in my college, and I already have mailing system which totally sucks - I can't even send pictures and it has lots of bugs (big companies like the one that gives service to my college just can't handle simple tasks because of all the bureaucracy).

Anyway, I found out that I can do something myself, for free, better than a company that will do it for 2000$ and worse. The problem is - because it's very buggy, I cannot export the mail addresses from that system to a different one so I sent everyone mail asking them to fill out a form I created using google documents (excel sheet - very useful). So there I have I another address book with 3000 students registered. now I can export it as xls or csv and import in a different mailing program.

Because I use google calendar and google documents I thought it would be easier to use gmail as my mailing platform because when I create a form I can invite people to fill it out directly from their mail - something that is not possible in other programs. Same goes if I have an important even - I can just sent invitations from google calendar, it's very easy. I've managed to send mail to 140 people in my address book, but I haven't tried more than that.

[remi]

Can't you use the Google calender to send your invitation to a Google Mailing List?

btw: It seems the problems with phplist and hebrew are solved:
http://forums.phplist.com/viewtopic....ghlight=hebrew
If phplist's import doesn't work for you, you can import the mailadresses with a tool like phpMyAdmin directly into the database tables from phplist. It's easy:
http://forums.phplist.com/viewtopic.php?t=6553

Regards,
Remi

[pauland]

I have 3500 students in my college

Presumably your college has an IT infrastructure with mail servers. Surely the IT staff could help you out here?

Paul

[juergen]

Like Paul mentioned.
Use the internal campus mail. E-mail doesn't need to leave the intranet and external hosters are not affected at all.

Juergen