What application (desktop or web based) can i use to create a mailing list with subscribe/unsubscribe features.
It should be able to import my contacts list in csv or gmail contacts file
Free or paid
I would prefer not hosting it (web application is preferred)
Not google Groups, I am using it for business clients
I think MailChimp is the way to go for this. It's now free for lists of up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails/month (though the free account does stick a MailChimp badge on your emails). They also have monthly plans and a pay as you go plan, which starts at $9 for 300 emails (.03 an email). Monthly plans start at $15/month.
It's web based, and they support importing from .csv, Google contacts, Salesforce, and other services. Here's a summary of features -- I've found the stats to be pretty helpful, and overall the site is easy (and even fun) to use and the results look professional.
You can use Google Groups for that. Just create a new group, and people can subscribe to the group or read it online like they themselves prefer. Don't think there's csv import support though.
A commercial but good one is YourMailingListProvider. They have a (limited) free option. But to be able to import csv you have to pay.
Mailman is the standard tool used by most open-source mailing lists. I'm not sure exactly if it can import your contacts in those formats.
Alternatively you could set up a Google Group if you don't want to host it yourself.
A group I volunteer with chose Campaign Monitor because of it's inexpensive price. It's web based and will do the import (and export) that you want.
iContact is a service that lets you run email campaigns for your clients. I haven't used their service to send emails, but I am on a few lists of companies that use their services to send marketing material. I have used a trial of theirs to test it out (it was for a project, not for real uses). They let you send out HTML emails and surveys. I'm not sure what the pricing is for it though.
Dada Mail's philosophy is simple - Be easy to setup, easy to administrate and easy for your visitors to interact with. Dada Mail itself is a sophisticated program, but time and effort has been put in to make it usable, something other programs forget to bother with and for good reason - its hard to make something easy. We put just as much time designing what Dada Mail looks like as we did developing the actual code. What's the worth of a Mailing List Manager you can't understand? Probably not the hundreds of dollars you might have paid for something similar or the hours you spent trying to make it work .Even through its development, as new features have been added, we've taken the time to step back and ask ourselves, "does this make sense?"
