Software/service for email marketing

Question

I am looking for a professional email marketing service or software.

I have a small company and send about 10 emails per year, all in 6 months period and my mailing list is about 1000 emails long and growing.

Features that I want in my software/service:

• Scheduled mailings
• duplicated emails check and;
• some sort of spam check/proofing.

Since I do not send a lot of emails I am guessing that a one time buy of software would be better for me compared to subscribing to a service. Are there any downsides with using software compared to a service?

I looked into a few programs, and 3 meet my demands:

• SendBlaster;
• GroupMail and
• e-Campaign

Answer 1

i'm wondering why you just look for a desktop-application or a paid web-service?!?

IMHO the best would be your own web-service! - therefor i never tried something like and have no experiences with the solutions you mentioned... but the advantages are obvious:

• you are platform independent, just a browser is needed
• you are device independent; you can also accomplish some tasks in your holidays with your smartphone or even a public surf-station
• you are not restricted or charged by messages and/or subscribers
• you don't have to hand over your costumers data to a third party
  HINT: in some countries you are not allowed to do so, if they not explicitly allowed you to do so.

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the concrete software i can recommend is phpList:

• it is foss under AGPL, therefor it is free of charge and if you lack some functions you are allowed to extend it in every possible way
• multilingual, translated into 30+ languages
• you can import/export, manage and organize your subscribers
• subscribers can opt-out and opt-in by themselves and also update their own data and subscription preferences
• mails can be personalized and written as text and html
• you can use and manage several templates
• decide exactly how you handle bounces
• campaigns can be scheduled
• analyze your campaigns with inbuilt statistics
• and you can try a demo at: http://demo.phplist.org/lists/admin/

and at the end, if you have a website with with more than just a simple html-site, i bet you have already everything you need (*AMP-server) to run phpList.

if you need help with the manual installation, they also provide a very detailed tutorial on their site.

Answer 2

Look into Mail Chimp and specifically at their Free package. You can have 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month for free. No need to purchase anything at all.

I have not used any of the programs you mentioned, so I don't know what advantages they do / don't provide. The obvious disadvantage to those programs is the one-time buy when in fact you don't have to spend any money at all.