I was researching newsletter management services and I found an ASP with a very useful set of services that include a mail list service along with other offerings that are simple to use and effective. The ASP is server.com and it has six offerings:
* DiscussionApp, a threaded message board with integrated mailing list and RSS syndication.ListApp, a mailing list manager.DBApp, a database for online address books, order forms, guestbooks, and so on.CalendarApp, a calendar application with integrated mailing list.NewsApp, an RSS newsfeed aggregator.GroupApps, group-oriented calendars, discussions and databases.
*
*
*
*
*
Today we'll focus on two of these services: the mailing list manager and the newsfeed aggregator.
You can set up an account by going to the Control Center and using your e-mail address for the account name and a password of your choice. You can then start a new DiscussionApp, ListApp, DBApp, CalendarApp, or NewsApps.
For new ListApps instances server.com first shows you the code to add to your Web site that creates both a subscription and unsubscribe form for your list. The management sections include messages (sent on subscription, after subscription submission, for user confirmation, and for unsubscription - yep, it is a real double opt-in system); view the subscriber list; create a message to be sent; archive maintenance, and password changing.
Server.com also offers ListApp Pro, which adds a database to the list manager so that you can collect demographic data and use it to target messages to specific subscriber subsets.
To prevent problems with major ISPs, ListApp sends test messages to ensure that there are no delivery problems and ListApp also automatically generates an RSS feed from the mailed out items.
ListApp can be used for free, but to remove the advertisement attached to each message you must pay - pricing is typically around $1 per thousand messages but actual pricing is on application.
NewsApp is a news aggregation service that retrieves the RSS feeds you specify and creates a single page of all of the feed items. A nice touch is that you can format the output using your own CSS specification.
NewsApp is completely free (there is no charged-for version).