I've been down that rabbit hole and the potential problems are an enormous headache.
The problem with using a commercial service to handle your mailing list is that you're very dependent on not only their infrastructure, but their reputation as well. All it takes is one of their *other* customers to end up on a spammer list for your messages to have problems with delivery. Not to mention your own messaging setup could trigger auto-flagging of that company as a spammer. If you can avoid it, you're better off handling things internally with whatever infrastructure you have in place. Otherwise you run the danger of learning way more about email delivery than anybody should ever really know. If you have to go external, choose a service that will leverage your own companies hostnames for delivery. (autonotifications.yourcompany.comrather than mail.biglistprovider.com) so that when you do end up having users with flagged messages you can whitelist without having to whitelist a plethora of other companies at the same time. And if you do that, you want to make sure you use SPF/DomainKeys/DKIM/SenderID again to ensure that your whitelisting is valid. It really is a simple thing that you want. Unfortunately, spammers have really mucked things up for the rest of us. Sorry - I don't have a recommended provider. I just had to throw my 2 cents in. Steve On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Joe Castleman <[email protected]>wrote: > ** > Howdy, > > I flagged this as off-topic since it really isn't a Remedy question per > se, though it does involve a Remedy system. > > We need to send different kinds of notifications from ARS to various > distribution lists. We would rather not build up these lists within ARS > (mainly because many of the recipients don't have Remedy access; also so I > won't have to be the one maintaining the distribution groups; and finally > so ARS would only have to send one message to 1-5 recipients instead of > 487). So we were thinking about setting up a separate server running > Mailman, Listserv or similar, and maintain the distribution lists on that > platform. > > However, management said, "why worry ourselves with more infrastructure?" > and suggested looking into a commercial distribution service. For example, > when Pottery Barn/Gap/whatever sends out a weekly marketing email, at the > end of the email it says "Powered by MegaSpammer" or some such. Trouble > is, these seem tailored to sending out feature-laden emails (as opposed to > the plain text we need to send out), and to one particular distribution > list. > > So, I'm back to looking for something like Mailman or Listserv, but paying > someone else to take care of it (all we'd have to do is configure our > mailing lists and send our messages). Can anyone recommend something like > this? (Alternately we're thinking of getting a virtual server on the cloud > somewhere like AWS, then installing Mailman on it, but then we'd still be > on the hook for maintaining Mailman, and management prefers that we > wouldn't even have to do that.) > > I wouldn't be surprised if I've overlooked something really obvious, but > so far all I'm finding are the "Powered by SpamRockets" with the fancy HTML > templates etc. > > Thanks, > > I'm Joe Castleman > _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
