Techy question - how does your preschool send emails to all parents?

[hotshipmate]

Hoping there are some lovely people who can help me with this one. My children's preschool sends out weekly update emails to about 50 parents. They are currently using Gmail but running into problems because Gmail thinks anyone sending an email to 50 people could be a spammer and they refuse to send it. I'm wondering how other preschools do this?

My oldest child's school uses a dedicated mass email and SMS service which they no doubt pay for. Preschool is a much smaller outfit with a very limited budget and the preschool leader is not very comfortable with technology so I'd really like to find a simple solution that she can cope with and doesn't cost much.

So if your preschool/nursery/school sends out mass emails to parents, does it come from an email address and if so, what is the email provider? (the bit of the email address after the @ sign). Or do they use a bulk mailing service and if so, which one?

Any help much appreciated.

I email all the parents from pur email at work.
We use horde email and don't have trouble sending it to around 60 addresses at once
For data protection reasons she should be using bcc so other people can't see everyone's email addresses
We do have a text system set up but its expensive to use and it is very limiting as its only so many characters long
What they could do is send the same email a few times in smaller groups
I do this sometimes if I'm sending out different newsletters to different groups
I have a lust saved in my documents and copy and paste it in my email address
We have just signed up for day share, an online diary that let's us send home a daily report by email but it has coat thousands to buy.

Ours doesn't communicate by email at all. It has a private Twitter feed which we follow and messages (nit warnings/term dates/pictures) are sent out on that.
It only takes 20 children and is abroad though so laws may be different.

Our class Teddy has gone AWOL too
OR its just runaway

We don't get emails from nursery
But for mass mailings from work we use mailchimp which is a newsletter type facility. Can be basic. Is free

There are quite a few things you can do to make it more likely your emails will get through:

1. Ask recipients to put the sending address in their contact list
2. Make sure you have a way to unsubscribe, and honour it. If emails bounce, remove them from the list asap
3. Does the nursery have its own domain? Ie a website with url www.hotshipmatenursery.co.uk). If so, there are some things you can do which will make emails sent 'from' that domain much more likely to get through. (I'll elaborate if they do)

Thank you for all the helpful replies. I will take a look at mailchimp. The preschool are happy for now using Gmail and splitting their mailing list into 2 halves but good to have an option. I'd prefer not to use solutions that require opt-in or parents doing anything at their end as some parents won't bother and will miss important messages.

Outlook. I thought this was the norm?