Automated Newsletter from ExpressionEngine with native or external mailing-service

Question

I'm planing several newsletters for one of my project.

The goal is to send out automated daily and weekly as well as sporadic manually sent Newsletters out to several mailing-lists.

Now as I know there actually are two ways to do that: use an external service like MailChimp or CampaignMonitor (which is better?) … or use a service on our own servers.

There are several modules to link ee with an external service and there are the native or local modules like EE Mailing List and FireMail. I know that using an external service might be better because of all the mailing/blacklist/whitelist/etcpp stuff … but what are the disadvantages of those services?

The Project I'm talking about has almost 10k members and therefore there may be thousands of subscribers. The raw-data of the newsletter will be ee-templates and should be (if possible) send absolutely automaticly each day (list 1) and weekly (list 2). There will also be several mailing-lists where newsletters will be sent only manually by me/our staff.

Now since there are so many Services, Modules etc out there: What is the best solution for this use-cases? And why? What are you using? And why are you using that? Or what are your experiences with that particular solution?

Answer 1

Postmaster is definitely a viable option for this. You could create a Notification to send email's using MailChimp, which I think would be better than CampaignMonitor for this. You could just setup a CRON job to send these notifications whenever you wanted. And if Postmaster doesn't get you everything you need out of the box, the API could be used to bridge the gaps pretty easily.

I would avoid sending emails with PHP. You are subject to all kinds of issues, like a heavy bounce rate for your emails, spam, IP blocking, and so much more. These mailing list services do a great job, and specialize in that specific task. No to mention, their networks and performance is already setup to scale to as many email addresses as you need. I wouldn't even bother trying to build this without one of these services.

http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/postmaster