Newsletter Tutorial:
Sending Your Newsletter

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By Peter Cooper

Now that you've actually started to develop your newsletter, you need to find a way to get it out to the public. It's an important consideration since if your newsletter can't get to your subscribers reliably then what's the point of running a newsletter?

There are two stages in sending/delivering a newsletter to your subscribers. Final formatting and actual delivery. We're going to cover both of these areas.

Final Formatting

Most of your formatting and editing work should have taken place by the time you're ready to send a newsletter. However, it's never too late to do a final spell/grammar check and checking that the correct articles are present in your newsletter.

The main point of final formatting is to make sure your newsletter will appear correctly on your subscribers machines. We have already covered how links should be constructed for AOL customers, but an even more important issue is text wrapping.

Whenever you send or receive an e-mail the text is usually wrapped. This means that if a line has 300 characters on it, it is broken up in several lines of a certain length so you can read it without having to scroll width ways. With normal e-mails it is not particularly important for them to be wrapped correctly since most people will scroll or their e-mail programs will do the wrapping for them. With your newsletter it is different. If your newsletter is hard to read, people won't read it and will unsubscribe!

Most people fix the word wrapping in their newsletters manually. Alternatively you could use a program such as Textpad, or even Outlook Express if you don't mind cutting and pasting your newsletter a bit. Word wrapping is not difficult however, and is best demonstrated by example.

Imagine this is a paragraph in your newsletter. It is not wrapped by default and the computer just wraps it whenever it sees fit so that it will fit into an HTML table or into the viewing area in your e-mail program. As such, it could look messy if people have different wrapping settings.

This text is wrapped at 50 characters wide, that
means that no line is longer than 50 characters
and any word that causes a line to go over 50
characters is moved onto the next line. It's best
to do wrapping after all text is spell checked
since you don't want to make changes after the
text is wrapped. It's hard work!

Most e-mails are wrapped at between 70 and 80 characters, but you need to go smaller than this since your newsletter has to be accessible and readable by users right down to 640x480 or those who choose to read their e-mails in a thin window. Most newsletter publishers suggest a line width of about 65 characters for newsletters.

Bear in mind however that you will not want to word wrap everything! Lines which contain long URLs (over 65 characters) can remain unwrapped so that the URL remains intact.

Delivering the Newsletter

There's four main ways in which you can handle the delivery of your newsletter to subscribers. Let's look at each:

'I'll just use Eudora/Outlook Express/Hotmail!'

Pros: Cheap, Easy to start with
Cons: Hard to handle with large subscriber numbers, Could lose your e-mail account

Before you consider it, you can't really use your personal e-mail program to do the job unless you're only sending the newsletter to a hundred subscribers at most. This is an extremely messy way of doing it, however, and your list of subscribers will be hard to manage.

Another problem with using your own e-mail program is that you could lose your e-mail account. Most ISPs won't be happy if you keep sending e-mails to large groups of people, and even if they don't mind, you may be reported for 'spamming' in the future. Spamming is when someone sends out an unsolicited junk e-mail. Remember that we said newsletters are not specifically spam, but they can appear like it.. and even if someone reports you as being a spammer and it's false, you could still be cut off. ISPs are very sensitive to spam complaints nowadays.

Free Services

Pros: Cheap, Usually very easy to use
Cons: Compulsory ads added to your newsletter in return for the free service

Using a free e-mail list service could be the ideal way to start delivering your newsletter. Most companies offer a free service which you can upgrade to a full payable service at any time. Usually the free service adds adverts for the mailing list company at the start or end of each of your mailings/newsletters, so be aware of this.

However, having a small advert tacked onto your newsletter is a small price to pay for having a reliable delivery system for your newsletters. Of course, you can easily upgrade to the full service and have these ads removed for a small fee.

The service we recommend is Microsoft's ListBot. We have no connections or affiliation with this service but we have reviewed this service and found it to be extremely reliable and feature packed. The initial service is free, but you can upgrade to an ad-free 'Gold' service for about $99 a year.

Read our Indepth Review of ListBot

If there is a specific reason you don't want to use ListBot then here is a list of free similar services although we do not officially recommend these services in any way:

Professional Services

Pros: You should get exactly what you need, No compulsory ads
Cons: Costs money, Could overreact to spam complaints

If you've got the money and you want to start paying for your mailing list service straight away then you can! The benefit with paying for the service is that you won't have ads added to your mailings by the mailing list company, and you should get exactly the service you require.

You'll get more features with a professional paid-for provider such as the ability to import existing lists of e-mail addresses, which is useful if you're changing your mailing list provider. You may also get extended e-mail or telephone support too which may prove useful if you're just starting out and have a number of questions.

Before you sign up with any professional providers make sure you check their terms and conditions in full. Make sure that the list of subscribers and e-mail addresses belongs to you and not the mailing list company. This is important since it means you have the right to move your list elsewhere if necessary. Check out their spam policy as well. Would they deactivate your account without consulting you first? If so, you may want to steer clear.

iBoost doesn't officially recommend any mailing list services, but the following are well known and have a good reputation:

Using a CGI Script

You may be lucky enough to receive mailing list facilities with your Web hosting account. Many ISPs offer this facility now and if you've got it for free then use it! You shouldn't have to have any ads tagged on and it shouldn't cost you any extra money. It's the ideal solution! Inquire with your Web space provider about this functionality.

If you definitely don't have this option pre-installed on your account, then you may be able to install a Perl/CGI based mailing list system yourself.

It's beyond the scope of this tutorial to explain how to install and set up a variety of CGI scripts, but here are some useful links:

Web or E-Mail Based Sending?

The way in which you actually send your newsletter to your subscriber list can be either via the Web or e-mail. In the first case you have to paste your newsletter into a box on a Web page and hit 'Send' for your newsletter to be sent out.

However, if you have to send an e-mail to a special address to send out your newsletter then you need to consider a problem you may have.

Many e-mail clients automatically wrap text at 80 characters per line, and since you've already pre-wrapped your newsletter you don't want to do this, especially on URLs which are meant to be over 65 characters length anyway. The only way to solve this problem is to disable word wrapping in your e-mail client, or increase the line length so much that wrapping will not occur.

To make word wrapping ineffective in Outlook Express, go to the Tools menu, select Options, select the Send tab, and there will be an area called 'Mail Sending Format'. Make sure this is on 'Plain Text' and click on 'Plain Text Options'. In this box you can increase the length of word wrapped lines. Increase it above 120 and you shouldn't have any problems, as long as you word wrapped your newsletter correctly earlier. If you use a different client such as Eudora, consult the help system and search for word wrapping.

Accused of Spamming?

If you're accused of spamming you need to sort it out straight away! If the subscriber writes to you only then immediately delete them from your subscriber list if they ask so. Don't delay since if they receive another newsletter from you they could complain to your mailing list provider or ISP.

If they don't appear on your subscriber list then politely ask them which e-mail address are your newsletters being sent to. Remember that they may not have signed up to your newsletter and it may be the result of a fraudulent subscription. Alternatively it could be that they didn't realize they were signing up to a newsletter subscription when they did. Deal with them politely and move quickly to resolve the problem.

If they have complained to your list provider or ISP and you are contacted by these organizations, then deal with them in a similarly amicable fashion. Explain what may have happened and carefully state that your newsletter is an opt-in newsletter only (that is, each subscriber chooses to join up) and you do not purchase lists of e-mail addresses to spam.

Some providers will still choose to drop you as a customer even with only a few spam complaints so it's best to deal with any problems as soon as possible. After all, if you're selling advertisements this could cost you a lot of money!

If your account is deactivated, make sure you can download the list of e-mail addresses who were subscribed to your newsletter. This is important because if you don't have your subscriber list then you have to start all over again! With your subscriber list you can go to another service and be back in business within days. Do note, however, that it's usually only the charged services which will allow you to import e-mail lists in this way.

Part 3