Email newsletter signup and sender?

April 2, 2015 2.6k views
System Tools CentOS
cliffc
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cliffc

Forgive the newbie question. I could not find a FAQ for this topic. A link to a "how-to" page for setting this up on DigitalOcean would be sufficient. Any tips would be welcome.

I would like to setup a web-page signup list for my customers who would like to know about upcoming training classes, and a mechanism to send them infrequent text email notices when classes are scheduled. I would like to include an opt-out option. I expect this list of customers to be small-ish.

A web search showed a GNU program called mailman. It looks like there is already a mailman user and group installed on the droplet. And "yum list mailman" shows that mailman.x86_64 version 3:2.1.12-18.el6 is installed, but I cannot find the install directory in the typical place and I cannot find an online tutorial or FAQ for mailman.

Can mailman be used? Is there a better free option to use?

Thanks - Cliff Cummings

1 comment
  • ryanpq MOD April 2, 2015

    Mailman could be used but I would strongly recommend against a self-hosted option for this. Managing proper records, unsubscribes, and numerous other details can be quite time consuming. There are a few commercial options that offer very good free plans that may be a better choice:

    1.) Mandrill - http://mandrill.com - Free tier allows sending up to 12,000 emails per month
    2.) MailChimp - http://mailchimp.com - Also has a free tier allowing up to 12,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 subscribers.

    If you do want to move forward with MailMan we do not have a tutorial that covers it's configuration but I was able to locate a tutorial on setting up MailMan on CentOS here that may be helpful.

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1 Answer
ryanpq MOD June 8, 2016

This question was answered by @ryanpq:

Mailman could be used but I would strongly recommend against a self-hosted option for this. Managing proper records, unsubscribes, and numerous other details can be quite time consuming. There are a few commercial options that offer very good free plans that may be a better choice:

1.) Mandrill - http://mandrill.com - Free tier allows sending up to 12,000 emails per month
2.) MailChimp - http://mailchimp.com - Also has a free tier allowing up to 12,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 subscribers.

If you do want to move forward with MailMan we do not have a tutorial that covers it's configuration but I was able to locate a tutorial on setting up MailMan on CentOS here that may be helpful.

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  • ryanpq MOD June 8, 2016

    Since this original post, Mandrill has changed their service and no longer offers a free tier. Sendgrid offers an alternative services which still offers a free plan.

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