Email campaigns and newsletters: software vs. hosted

[Erin]

I'm doing a little research into a better way to send email to my newsletter subscribers. (I've got about 70K subscribers now.)

Here's a sample of what I've found:

Scripts

http://www.getresponse.com/: $18/mo Wha...??? How can this be possible?
http://www.activecampaign.com/12all/: $189
http://www.interspire.com/sendstudio/: $239


Hosted

http://www.aweber.com/: $80/month. Unlimited emails sent to these 70K addresses.
http://www.constantcontact.com/: 'Call for pricing'. Scary. 25K is $150/month.
http://www.verticalresponse.com/: $595/month

Of course it'd be great to install a script on my own server, but I'm worried that it might get blacklisted. But then, how do I know the other services aren't blacklisted?

And what's up with aweber? Is that too good to be true?

[MaxS]

I wouldn't host it on your own server. There are a lot of legalities to take into consideration when sending mass-emails.

For what it's worth, I've heard good things about Aweber.

[Westech]

I agree that you shouldn't send out to such a large mailing list from your own server. There's too much chance of invalid complaints causing huge headaches for you. I'd use a hosted service.

We use www.ezinedirector.com and it works well for us. They'd charge you around $70 for 70k emails per month. They charge per email sent rather than per address, so if you sent out 2 newsletter in one month the price would be double for that month.

[Erin]

Yeah, I was doing a little research at the usual places, and I've seen some people say that the scripts with that many emails can cause problems.

I haven't seen anything bad said about aweber yet, and they offer a 30-day trial, so I will probably try them.

[Erin]

Well, I'm getting started with aweber. So far I'm really impressed with their backend. It's very intuitive, lots of clear tool-tip style help, lots of AJAX in the right places so that you don't have to reload the whole page.

I can import only 2000 emails a day, which means it'd take me a month to move my emails over. I'm going to contact their support about that.

[Blue Cat Buxton]

Aweber also has a blog notification tool as well, to help build up your list and promote a blog

[agua]

I have a friend who is raving about Campaign Monitor (http://www.campaignmonitor.com/) - but I just looked at their pricing and it may be a little high compared to the others (unless my calculations are off).