https://gist.github.com/MaximilianKohler/84d2175472612a34bcc1c2ebf99b91d4
When I searched for this I had a very hard time finding a right answer because all the results were SEO blogs advertising their newsletter services (Mailchimp, Convertkit, etc.), which is not the same thing.
My use case is that I have a Google form collecting tens of thousands of applications. And I need to reply to those people en masse (a few thousand per day). None of the newsletter services are designed for this, and they’re all very expensive.
Even if your use case is a regular newsletter, setting up your own server is way cheaper.
My goal was to find the most cost-effective, user-friendly, bulk/mass email sender with good deliverability and open rates. One-time, 100,000+ emails per month, 3-4k/day.
Feel free to share your input in the comments. I’m a total noob and had never dealt with anything like this in the past. But have now hosted multiple sites for various reasons, and wrote guides for them as well.
The short answer is that you need to set up your own web server (Hetzner, AWS, DigitalOcean, etc.), install an email software on it (Listmonk, Mailwizz, Mautic), and use an SMTP like Amazon SES. It’s not that hard. If you’re on Windows, Putty and FileZilla will be your main programs to access your server. When using CSV files for your contacts, you want to use UTF-8 format.
I don’t think there’s such a thing, all bulk emails is spam to me as a user.
Some mailing lists are membership and/or opt-in only. There are legitimate needs for bulk mailing.