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[ryansumo]

Hi All,

Someone commented on Twitter that we ought to have a mailing list signup on our blog, which is probably good advice.  My question is, how do you guys manage this?  Right now I have so few inquiries about the game that I just forward them to my work gmail account.  Assuming that I start getting more inquiries as time goes on, what would be the best way to manage incoming emails?  Should I create a new email account?  Should I use mailchimp or google groups (I've seen both used).

If I sound really confused it's because I am!  Hope you all can help me out?

[doihaveto]

We use MailChimp. Very easy to use and style the way you want, and makes list management easy. And their price structure is indie friendly.

[Chris Koźmik]

I'm not using any of these, so just my theorethical thoughts.

I think I would go for some sort of "phplist", set up on your own mail server. I was comparing the numbers of the various mail services and the pricing makes no sense to me. So far I have 200k emails total of various people who played/tried my games collected. I would need to pay $800/month for that number of subscribers (no matter if I send anything or not), which is way beyond my budget :D
You might say "if I have hundreds thousand emails I will be so rich it's not a problem". You won't OK, maybe my situation is a bit unusual since I make F2P (so my numbers of players is inflated x100 :D) but still, in a long run self serving solution seems the only way...

[jgrams]

If you have large numbers of members you might also try http://www.ymlp.com/ as their prices go up less quickly.

IME it's best to leave this sort of thing to professionals, as with spam being so endemic it's tricky to do. It's very easy to get your server blacklisted and then no-one will get your stuff... And even if you manage to avoid that it can be difficult to get through reliably. And it can be hard to find hosting for that sort of thing: AFAICT most providers' terms of service specifically prohibit it. But maybe you know more about it than I do...

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i use YMLP, mentioned above. and yes, use a service like this, do not try to do something like this yourself, or your email account could be in danger of being declared a spam email. at the very least, if you want to do something yourself, use a new email, unconnected to your actual email, otherwise you could be endangering your regular email account.

[Chris Koźmik]

If you have large numbers of members you might also try http://www.ymlp.com/ as their prices go up less quickly.

Much better indeed Unlimited database and paid by number of emails actually sent.

IME it's best to leave this sort of thing to professionals, as with spam being so endemic it's tricky to do. It's very easy to get your server blacklisted and then no-one will get your stuff... And even if you manage to avoid that it can be difficult to get through reliably. And it can be hard to find hosting for that sort of thing: AFAICT most providers' terms of service specifically prohibit it. But maybe you know more about it than I do...

Well, you don't do it using your primary domain/email. Also, IPs are easy to obtain (so you are rather shielded).

As for providers not allowing it, I think it's a myth. It's not like we are doing any spam, it's a legitimate sending of emails (as long as you follow the rules). Of course I meant something like dedicated/VPS, shared host providers might object to it much more I suppose.

Anyway, if you reach your costs of sending emails to $100/month I would go for a cheap VPS and use it just for it (also these are frequently managed so they can setup this for you for free anyway - so your lack of expertise is not such a problem).

But yeah, if your need are small I agree the $3.75 /month for YMLP is the way to go (I assume you can always export emails from their system and go for your own solution?)

[ryansumo]

Thanks guys, we've just set up with mailchimp.  Thanks for bringing up ylmp as well.  mailchimp's prices do seem to escalate pretty quickly.  I do wonder if we'll hit that cap at all even.  Have any of you exceeded the 2000 person cap? (note: looks lke Archibald has way surpassed that, so anyone else?)

I'll consider switching over to ylmp or Archibald's suggestion of a dedicated VPS when we get to that point, since mailchimp allows you to export your data anyway.

Thanks for the feedback guys, and hope it's useful for everyone else as well!

[jgrams]

Well, you don't do it using your primary domain/email. Also, IPs are easy to obtain (so you are rather shielded).

Well, sure, but do you really want to obtain a new IP address every time you send out a mailing? My experience has been that a lot of people who aren't tech-savvy will flag unwanted e-mails as spam even if you have an unsubscribe link and all that, and then you get blacklisted. Which you can probably get removed if you're legit, but it's a pain in the ass. And some providers do their own blacklisting or whatever -- I remember AOL being really strict. Even using YMLP (and sending once a week to about 130 people), it seems like once a month or so it doesn't get through to a couple of the 15 or so aol addresses.

As for providers not allowing it, I think it's a myth. It's not like we are doing any spam, it's a legitimate sending of emails (as long as you follow the rules).

Yeah, I looked at several VPS hosts' terms of service and they don't seem to prohibit it now. Four or five years back when I was looking into this before, I couldn't find any place that would allow it (not that I looked all that hard, but the six or eight which I looked at didn't).

Anyway. I'm not saying you absolutely can't do it on your own, just that it's harder than most programmers probably think it is. You need to make sure your reverse DNS works, and your SPF records are set up correctly, and that your sending software is careful not to send too many messages in too short a time to the same host, and monitor things to see if you get on any blacklists and request to be taken back off, and probably some other things that aren't occurring to me just now.

[deWiTTERS]

I used to manage a mailing list for a game company that I worked for, back in 2005 or something like that (+- 20.000 subscribers). I was using Mailman on our own server. But the hunt for spam made it really difficult to continue doing this on our own. Reverse DNS lookups, manually unsubscribing from blacklists, etc. If your list is big enough, some subscribers *will* mark your mail as spam.

I highly doubt that things have changed since then. Believe me, it's much more expensive running your own mailing list software than using a service such as YMLP.

[Chris Koźmik]

What about phplist (http://www.phplist.com/)? It's quite an old script, still developed. It seems it handles bouncing and other things (never used it myself).

I remember AOL being really strict.

Well, AOL and Hotmail are the lost case in the first place. I'm surprised you even got any mails go through it (I remember around like 7 years ago basicly all browser games had this notice "If you have AOL or Hotmail mail the confimation email probably will not arrive", or even straight disallowed registering with that email )