Computer help... the simplest way to email lots of addresses

[cityofmarvels]

I want to send out a newsletter/mailing to my customers (only those who have signed up-about 1500)preferably with colour pictures and link back to the website. At the moment I just have their email addresses on order file in the back office of the website not in any address book so I have to a)make up the mailing list and b)design a nice mailing and c) send it out obviously without giving everyones email address out to everyone else...

As you can see I am not at all sure how to go about this ...is there a software programme which will make it easy or do I just muddle through and if so how?

Any suggestions will be a real help...

just a bump in case anybody has any ideas for me...

The only tip I can give is, you can use bcc. Send the newsletter to yourself, and bcc everyone else.

Oh, wait, I just checked, and you can do this in Outlook, at least, you can build up a list of people, and then send mail to those people (again, though, use bcc!). You can add and delete people from the list, so you don't have to type it all in every time.

Also, it's nicer to not send colour pictures to people, but just to send links. This is because people on dialup will have to stay online downloading all the pictures, whether they want to see them or not.

The best thing to use would be an online service like getresponse.com - they also handle things like an unsubscribe link and bouncebacks for you and every email will be addressed to each person on the list. I haven't looked lately, but the service may be text only.

The other way to do it would be to paste them into the bcc (blind carbon copy) field in an email, with a comma between each, in your normal email prog. The big disadvantage of that is that a) you get all the bounce backs, and many people's spam filtering automatically filters emails where their address is not in the "to" field.

NB if you send pics, make sure they are small, or you'll really annoy people.