I’m wondering, who has the largest EE-powered mailing list?  I was running a site with 3,900 emails, but they switched to Constant Contact.

Any suggestions?

TTFN
Travis

I’m curious what protocol (and what service provider, if any) you were using… I have a client with several larger mailing lists (1500-2500 or so) who’s having a devil of a time getting up and running with SMTP.

We’ve done testing w/AuthSMTP and FuseMail with not-fantastic results so far (at the risk of irritating all of our subscribers and the in-house people who are ready to get started sending emails through the new service as soon as possible).

Send attempts seem to either time out or just plain hang indefinitely so that only the first batch gets sent (tests used suggested batch setting at 300, which may be too many?). Their pre-EE setup used an in-house server to send these emails out, but in-house IT folks are reluctant to open all the ports necessary to do that with EE and SMTP, so outside service is necessary, but the service providers (and my client) are not satisfied that the current problems aren’t related to EE and not something amiss in how our service is being handled or set up on their end.

Any advice or “best practice” info you might have for someone in our situation would be most appreciated.

I was using SMTP at Nexcess.net, and my advice would be, don’t use EE for mailing lists bigger than about 3,000.  The EE folks will say it’s a matter of your server hardware only.  But what that’s really saying is that a big enough box will compensate for however their code is written.

Try:
Constant Contact
Emma
PHPList

I researched and tested out about a dozen of these email marketing services. These four took the cake:

Campaign Monitor

Mail Chimp

Vertical Response

iContact

Each is slightly different (features, focus, pricing model), but they all were intuitive and seemed to be run by good companies.

Good luck!