Hi - I'm new to WHT and hosting. I know there are other threads on this topic but could not find one that fits.

We are a small non-profit (High School PTA) and would like to sending weekly newsletters to our parents who are paid members and have provided an email address on their membership forms. Although we have about 2000 members, our list is about 800 subscribers. We expect this to max out at about 1500 over the next year or two. The newsletter is produced in MS Publisher and is sent as an ‘email message’ through outlook. Looked at email services – afford them right now.

I am looking for a hosting company/service that will allow:

1. Maximum deliverability -we have issues with Comcast and AOL. Surprisingly, yahoo and hotmail have been fine.

2. We do not want opt-in – we want to be able to add addresses. We tried yahoo groups but I kept battling parents who would let invitations expire and ask that I resend or those who requested that I ‘just’ add them because they had already provided their address or because are not email savvy enough to follow the links! Yahoo groups limits the number of address on their ‘free’ list and you can add only 10 members per day. This was fine when we had only 100-200 but cannot do this with a growing list.

3. Need to way to ‘manage’ the list – meaning see which email address received the newsletters successfully, which ones got rejected by individual’s filter, which ones were blocked by the providers, email address which are no longer valid, etc. Currently, I have no way (that I know of) to get this information. I do not know PHP scripts or cgi-bin scripts – am willing to learn if there is a simple tutorial here on the forum.

4. All other needs are minimal.

Thank for your help!

If you really need maximum deliverability, you should seriously consider an e-mail service, even if they are slightly above your price range.

You might be able to get by with a shared hosting account, however I would highly advise against it, since you may get your account suspended, and you may not even be able to send that many e-mails depending on your providers hourly/daily e-mail volume limitations.

Best of luck.

If you are going to send bulk email I think that you need at least VPS or small dedicated and more over you need to get in toch with your web hosting provider to let him know about what you are going to do.

Check out iContact, I think they should handle most of what you need. Rates are pretty reasonable, and they have a 20% non-profit discount which you should qualify for. For sending email, you'll have to go through their web-based interface but if you have an HTML message composed you should be able to copy/past into it pretty easily.

http://siteinteractive.com/subpro/

All of mine are double-opt-in or you can add email addresses. I've never added email addresses, but I did test it to ensure that it worked.

I send a couple of thousand messages through a shared account... you don't need vps or dedicated for such a limited amount of messages. If it were 150,000, yes... for 1,500... hmmm, no.

Anyway, the other suggestions are fine as well... if you don't want to send via your hosting account do it via a company in the business to send emails. And get off MS publisher... the code in publisher will make your newsletters look like spam.

Best way I've found in sending newsletters is to build the newsletter on my website then send the newsletter (text, not html) with links to my website. I don't know what "professionals" recommend, but this works for my setup.

http://www.phplist.com along with a decent shared hosting provider will serve your purpose, for sending limits, phplist can batch process to over come the limits.

The best one I've found is Constant Contact (dot com)

I especially like how they say they have "high email deliverability rates due to strong partnerships with ISPs"

Some of their earlier press releases (2003 I think) refer to AOL and IBM compatibility. One of their strong footholds is that they deal with each and every spam complaint very seriously.

I don't know how they are doing in 2008, but its worth checking them out.