[thelist] list manager (broadcast only) recommendations

[Aredridel]

On Tue, 2003-06-24 at 15:35, bruce at brucelawson.co.uk wrote:
> Hi list,
> my boss wants to be able to send approx 200,000 html mails/ week reliably
> with unsubscribe facility, automatic deletion from the database of garbage
> email addresses, and automatic retry of temporarily bouncing addresses.
> These are broadcast newsletters rather than discussion lists. Lyris is way
> too expensive, so does anyone have any other recommendations?
> We're running Windows servers, SQL Server 2K database. Ease of set-up and
> reliability are the most important criteria.

I'd set up a good mail server on a unix box -- 200,000 emails a week is
not much, really, so a low-end pentium running linux could do it.  I'd
use Exim (http://www.exim.org) as a mail transfer agent, because it's
retry and queuing to remote sites is so good, and I use Ecartis
(http://www.ecartis.org) as mailing list software and I've found it to
be /very/ reliable and easy to set up.  It handles removing bounced
addresses nicely, and has a web interface for list configuration, and is
relatively easy to interface with custom subscribe scripts, too.

The built-in SMTP server under windows 2000 is not very good at all, and
anything to replace it is going to run at least what Lyris does.

PLD-Linux (http://www.pld-linux.org) has pre-built packages for both
exim and ecartis.

Ari