[consulting] Current state of newsletter systems

[Benjamin Melançon]

Add me to the list of well-wishers for both Rob Barreca's simplenews
extension (e-mailing all your users should be a built-in admin option,
not a newbie's nightmare of dead-end roads!) and Scott Trudeau's
glimmer of an idea for a public API for CiviMail.

Best of luck also to CivicSpace Labs' turnkey solution for
Drupal+CiviCRM+CiviMail.

On CiviMail, last month I'd bugged a bunch of hosts about the
possibility of a shared-hosting set-up that would allow CiviMail, for
smaller orgs.  There was some interest.  There's also interest from
the good folks at http://electricembers.com for integrating their
mailing list software with CiviCRM, but they've pointed out that they
are Sympa based (which does the mailing list stuff well, not the
personalized newsletter).  But I really want to integrate their
amazingly affordable mass e-mail services with Drupal somehow (maybe
Organic Groups).

Right now my web design collective is setting CiviMail up on a VPS for
a client, and depending on how this goes we may be in the
CiviMail-capable site business ourselves.

There's obviously tons of room and need for integration of Drupal with
mass e-mail in multiple ways, and I'd appreciate folks keeping me
abreast of their efforts, with which I'd be happy to help.

My big nonprofit change-the-world idea is democratically moderated
mailing lists, allowing for practical many-to-many communication on a
large scale.  (See http://pwgd.org/ )  Don't know the best base for
this yet.

Sorry, I've wandered a bit off-topic..
-ben

Agaric Design Collective
Open Source Web Development
http://AgaricDesign.com/

People Who Give a Damn
building the infrastructure of a network for everyone
http://pwgd.org/