Best way to send legit email (NOT SPAM) to ~250 ppl?

[Sir Fredrick]

I'm helping a friend who is a very talented musician with his website. Approximately 250 people have signed up to be on his mailing list. We would like to send them all an announcement when his website is finished. What's the best way to go about doing this?
It would be especially cool if he or I could send email to all of them via a listserv or something like that. For example, maybe we could send an email to list@hiswebsite.com and it would be redirected to everyone.
It would also be cool if they had an automated way of unsubscribing so if they change their minds about wanting to be on the list they can get off easily.
We don't have to worry about getting in trouble with the ISP for spamming, since everyone on the list actually wrote their email address on a sheet of paper for the specific purpose of joining his mailing list. However, most ISPs will not allow you to send email to that many people at once, because of all the problems they do have with spam.

Any suggestions?

 

[bunker]

Did you even try doing a search?

 

[Sir Fredrick]

Originally posted by: bunker
Did you even try doing a search?

No sir, I did not. because I wasn't quite sure what to search for, and I was also certain there would be lots of options out there and since I didn't know which one was best, I would have to try a bunch of different ones.
I figured I'd tap the powers of AT since there must be plenty of people here with experience, and they could tell me the BEST solution. for this.

Is the link you shared something you actually use and like, or was it the first thing that came up on google? Ah well, thanks either way.

 

[saftey]

Look for a program called mcspammer it works awesome,i know i know the name but trust me on this one it emulates a smpt server u can send via any email u choose.

 

[bizmark]

Mailman is a very good email list program for *NIX. It's GNU, so it's free. 🙂

edit: it's got extremely easy admin, and it's very easy for people to log in and change their options or unsubscribe, etc.

 

[Sir Fredrick]

Thanks, will look into those. Any more suggestions?

 

[hoihtah]

there are lots of mailers out there...
but from experience... i'd say that gammadyne mailer is the best one.
the gui sucks.
but the features that it has... and the fact that it's a shareware...
it has more than what you need.

 

[hoihtah]

here's the link if you want to check it outhttp://www.gammadyne.com/mmail.htm

 

[kranky]

I use something called blat. It's a command-line utility, but that's my preference so I can store repetitive commands in text files and execute them again by running the file.

 

[Harvey]

Whatever program you use, make sure you mark every name as Blind cc or Bcc. This hides the name of all recipients from all the others. This is important, because it prevents people from harvesting such large address lists for spamming purposes.

 

[Sir Fredrick]

Originally posted by: Harvey
Whatever program you use, make sure you mark every name as Blind cc or Bcc. This hides the name of all recipients from all the others. This is important, because it prevents people from harvesting such large address lists for spamming purposes.

Thanks Harvey. I already knew that, but it's a good point for anyone sending out email to lots of people. It also sucks for the recipients to have to download a list of 250 email addresses before they can even read your message. Especially since some email clients will show the "to:" field in the email message itself, meaning that the recipient would also have to scroll through pages of email addresses, not fun.