I often recommend services like campaignmonitor.com for sending email newsletters to companies I deal with. Services like these take care of making sure your emails end up in your subscriber's inbox and not their spam folder, which is a much tougher job than you'd think.
The problem us artists face is that we're operating on a much tighter budget than businesses, and these types of services can add up quickly. We need to extract as much value as possible out of each penny spent, and at $0.01/email, we're going to run out of pennies using a service like that.
So along comes a service called messagepub.com that provides not just email but also Twitter, Google Chat, AIM, text and phone messages for a fraction of the cost ($0.0015/email, and the first 5,000 are free!). The catch is, it's made for web developers. You need to know how to code to get it to do anything.
Well, I just happen to code a bit. So I wrote a simple newsletter tool for my site here that sends emails through messagepub.com. I call it PubMail. You can try it out by subscribing to my newsletter if you want, and you'll even get a free song download in the welcome message for signing up :)
You can download PubMail for free (open source!) from its new home here:
http://github.com/jbroadway/pubmail
Just go to the downloads page and you'll see a zip file there. The homepage includes detailed info to help you get started, and I wrote it using PHP5 which is available on almost any shared host, so chances are you're already set up to use it, just unzip and go!
I hope other artists, bands, labels, or anyone else looking for a simple and affordable email newsletter/mailing list program will find this useful to them. If you know someone who might find this useful, please pass it along. If you have any questions or suggestions for improvements, send 'em my way!
- Johnny
