Revisiting Large Email Lists Sending
It’s been some time since I’ve had a look at the servers and providers in the large email list sending space. I’ve had several clients contact me to help them with their own large lists, so I decided it was time to have another look at where things stand right now. Many clients still confirm to me: “This is much harder than we though it would be!”.
It seems that the large email sender software packages are still available, though pricing has increased quite a bit. Your options in this area are:
- ListMailPRO ($69.00) – My older standby favorite, I still use it every day and it still works like a charm. I could not live without ListMailPRO – it is that good, and it has stood up to the test of time. I do provide customization, tuning and setup for ListMailPRO on just about any server that you have, though I still highly recommend a fully managed VPS server, or Dedicated server for larger lists.
- OEMPRO ($299.00) – It still looks like a reliable solution but I have not tried it yet, and the forums do report failures and slow sending on larger lists.
- ActiveCampaign ($499.00) – One of the older sending software suites. I’ve tried/tested it a few times and it worked (though slower than ListMailPRO) at the time, it may be better now. Provides plugins for triggers, birthday sending and much more.
- Omnistar Mailer ($287.00) – This one still looks pretty good. I did test this out myself many years ago and it performed reasonably, but again, since I’ve not touched it in many years I’m not sure how reliable it is now. At the time it could not match ListMailPRO.
- PhpLIST (free) – This free alternative looks like it has found good technical replies in the forums, and it could be considered a good match for ListMailPRO, but I’m still partial to ListMailPRO, and I have tested this myself as well.
- DadaMail ($50 Pro) – This software is still being updated, and it looks like a reliable alternative. The last I looked it ran Perl/CGI, but I’m not sure if it still does.
That pretty much does it for the mail server software packages I recommend, except for one other that is in Beta. It looks to be real promising and I will write up an entire review of it: Amazon SES (Simple Email Service), which includes these Amazon SES Scripts. Regarding send rates and validating bounce/spam rates, the two big players are still around and worth trying out as they both have free trials available, here they are.
- Email Reach – one of the best choices for checking your email deliverability. Excellent.
- Sender Score – a part of ReturnPath.net they also provide a free trial to let you check your sending, deliverability and bounce rate.
That’s all for this post. Watch for my new review of Amazon SES coming soon as I test that service out. By my calculations, the pricing on Amazon SES could come in at under $1.00/month for sending text only messages to very large lists, and that is very refreshing!
If you require Large List email server setup, configuration or tuning do not hesitate to contact me at my webdesign company website: BGS Web Design
