I work for a large statewide association that has thousands of paying
members.  Some of these members provide us with their email address so
the member can receive weekly email updates regarding various aspects
of the association.  I am looking for a legitimate solution that
allows us to send out email to these members without being blocked by
the various spam blocking systems that ISPs currently use (we
understand that the email clients also have spam blocking but I am
mostly concerned about the ISP spam filtering systems in place today).

Thanks so much for your help.  I really appreciate your expertise.

------------------------------
Some more info that might be helpful to you:

1) We have an in house proprietary database system that we use to keep
updated member info.  That database contains the email address of the
members that would like to receive our updates.  It is not an option
to modify this database to either send email or to interact with
anyone else?s email system.

2) As it relates to the email issue above, we will output a list of
email addresses each time we want to send an email.  This allows us to
select very specifically which individuals receive which updates based
on certain criteria in our current system. This exported list (xls,
tab, dbf, etc.) would then be used in whatever service you might help
us find for our bulk email.  This means using something like yahoo
groups or hotmail?s opt in email system does not appear to be an
option since it would cause us to have to maintain two databases of
current information.

3) Our current web/email hosting company does not have a solution
available to us regarding our bulk mail needs and we would rather not
have to leave them in order to solve our problem.  However, we do own
several other domains that are not being used that we would be happy
to use in order to address our bulk mail needs.  In other words, if
you can find us a solution that requires us to setup hosting with
another company, we have domain names we can use for that.

4) Ideally this would be a password protected web-based solution that
allows us to simply go to a web form and A) past in the exported email
addresses, B) paste in the email message, and C) click send and we are
done.

5) Our emails are not personalized so the final solution can send one
email to 5,000 email addresses or one email to every individual email
address, however, we want to protect the privacy of the member email
addresses from the other members - in other words if one email goes to
multiple addresses they would have to go out via BCC.

6) We don?t send attachments to members.  We only need to send text-based email.

7) We are willing to entertain solutions in various price ranges.  In
other words, we don?t want to miss the perfect solution because it
would cost too much.

8) We want the company we pay for this service to help keep our emails
from being blocked by the major ISP based spam systems.  We do not
have the time nor the resources to investigate and protect against
AOL, Google, Yahoo, etc. blocking our emails and we are willing to pay
for such a service.

9) We currently use an in house bulk email solution that uses our
email hosting SMTP server.  If we send out 5,000 emails over 1,500 of
them are bounced back to us without any info on how to stop the email
from being blocked.  We constantly receive member complaints that they
aren?t receiving our email updates.  Each member receives their own
individual email so it can?t be that the emails are blocked because
there are too many people in one email.  We send out 50 emails a
minute so it takes quite a while to send out 5,000.  If we take those
blocked emails and try to send to them a couple hours later many of
those emails go through rather than being blocked (so it must be a
temporary block).  In other words, we are tired of trying to figure
out why this process doesn?t work and would like to pay someone else
to make it work for us :)

10) As I mentioned, the ideal system would be a web based, password
protected, form that would allow us to paste in the email body and the
email addresses and the service would take care of the rest.  We are
flexible on the formatting of both parts.

11) We would rather not use in house bulk mailing software, but if we
do, the service you recommend should provide the SMTP server for us to
use and they should also deal with the headaches associated with
helping our email get through.  We would like to have someone we can
call or email as we have problems related to our bulk mail getting
through.

12) We would rather do business with a company that has a good
reputation rather than a spamming company.  I just can not imagine
that other associations aren?t in the same boat we are in, but when I
try to find the solution all I find are shady spamming companies. 
Image and privacy are important to us so unless the shady spammers are
the only solution we would rather go with a legitimate company.

My personal reccomendation, as a commentator and not a Researcher,
would be to use the GoDaddy.com Express Email Marketing service.  For
your company, solutions will start at just $29.99/yr-$49.99yr.  As a
GoDaddy domain subscriber, I currently am very satisfied with their
services and overall customer support.

According to your specifications you indicated that you had to be able
to import and export lists, and that is possible with the Express
Email Marketing service.  It is a spam-free and legal solution, with
many extra features in the event that your company decides the need to
use them.

Features of the service "in a nutshell" include:

[Subscriber Management]
List import & export
Advanced segmentation (interest groups)
Bulk list removal
Custom exporting
Activity reporting
Member profiles/history 
View campaign subscriber lists 
Customize subscriber list view

The service features an email tracking bonus, generating easy-to-use
reports that tell you how many you sent, how many were opened, and how
many people responded, among other things.  This could prove to be a
valuable resource to the company.

URL:
https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/blazers/cb_landing.asp?se=%2B&ci=279

If this is what you're looking for, and would like more information,
please feel free to leave a clarifying comment on your own question
page and I will do whatever I can to help.

Searches used (in google):

email marketing "express"

email marketing "campaign" "software"

email marketing customer "email campaign"

Direct URLs:
http://www.godaddy.com
https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/blazers/cb_landing.asp?ci=279

Sincerely,
oberholtzer

I've done e-mail newsletters for several small organizations and been
pretty happy with Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com). I've
also read good things about Campaign Monitor (www.campaignmonitor.com)
and talked to a small nonprofit executive director who was using, I
think, JangoMail (www.jangomail.com) and was happy with it. And
there's a whole list of further options, along with a report you can
buy, here:

http://www.sherpastore.com/Buyers-guide-email-service-providers-deliverability-firms.html

Hope that helps.

It sounds like you know what you are doing which is good! This is a
pretty common issue for legit folks who want to send bulk email. You
most certainly do not want to deal with a shady business because when
they send garbage they get blocked which means your emails get blocked
too. Not good. You need a respectable provider who isn't getting
blocked constantly because they service both good and bad email
campaigns.

Nothing against the solutions already suggested but they tend not to
be the kind of high quality service you are looking for. I've been an
email admin for 10 years and my personal favorite company for this
sort of thing is Lyris. They would be happy to sell you their software
which would run on your own network but you would need an email admin
to manage it and it sounds like you want to offload that work which is
reasonable. Lyris also offers a web-based service as you described -
it is called Lyris ListHosting. Within ListHosting they have a few
different service offerings. You can see a summary of them at
http://www.lyris.com/products/listhosting/ though it appears to me
that their Newsletters solution is best for you (info at
http://www.lyris.com/products/listhosting/features_newsletters.html).

You will find that ListHosting enables you to easily add and remove
large numbers of email addresses and provides really helpful reporting
after the fact so you can see which messages went through, which ones
were bounced, etc. Lyris' pricing is pretty reasonable in this space
and their tech support is first rate.

All this having been said, you do need to manage your expectations a
little. There are two key issues with large lists. The first is that
you are always going to have a lot of bounces becase the recipient's
email server was down at that moment, the recipient's email address
changed or is no longer valid, or any number of other things outside
of your control. The second issue is that you just simply cannot
control what other email hosts on the Internet will do with your
messages. Every email admin on the planet is trying his/her hardest to
block spam and they end up blocking an awful lot of legitimate but
bulk emails like your stuff. No one can resolve that issue for you
regardless of how much you pay them. Your best bet is to work with a
trustworthy company with good service and support so you can trust
that at least you have the best possible solution.

My experience is that when you don't have a bulk email solution that
you are confident about, you tend to assume that the problems are on
your end and when individuals claim they didn't get the message you
assume it is indeed your fault. It may very well be that that user's
own email system blocked the message but they wouldn't know that so
they complain to you and you don't have good information about things
so you can't say with confidence what happened. This is, I think,
where Lyris' reporting comes in. If you can lookup the last delivery
to that user and confidently determine what happened, you'll feel a
lot better about things.

Managing a bulk email list is still a nightmare - you're always adding
and removing and finding new addresses that are suddenly dead. Still,
if you have a decent solution it makes things tolerable.

I've opted not to go into greater detail about Lyris ListHosting
because you appear technical enough to do the reading on their site
and learn about the service and you should anyway. Also, Lyris is a
company with real people working there so you should let them help you
get set up and provide the kind of service you want. If you click on
Contact Me or Sign up for ListHosting on their site they will take
your contact info and a real live human will call you and help you get
started. I hope this is helpful - feel free to post follow-up
questions.

Including GoDaddy.com service you can find similar options from many
web hosting companies..have a visit at cashbackwebhosting.com to find
them..choose a company you feel most comfortable with..