I won’t tell you how I McGyvered my first emails…
Oh… I will tell you. Back then, I wasn’t aware that AWeber had been created. So I used my own email program.
Nah, Gmail didn’t exist either.
I had a desktop program, and I combined it with a HTML form online, a pearl script (don’t ask) and code in my email program…
So that people could automatically subscribe and unsubscribe.
With lots of help from geeks online, I (that’s we) made it work.
You have no idea how much easier it is today, haha.
And in this series of ESPs, Email Service Providers, we’ve reached Sendy.
Sendy is the easiest thing to use, definitely the easiest self-hosted autoresponder, and I love it.
I use it for one of my email lists that has nothing to do with anything else I do. So I don’t want to add those people to Voopti (this one).
A reminder of the six only autoresponders I recommend:
Sendy is super-affordable. You buy it once and keep it until next big upgrade. If you don’t want to upgrade, you just keep the version you have.
No monthly subscription.
You can easily integrate with Amazon SES… I mean… Sendy made it easy.
Amazon made it darn hard!
That’s why I recommend you use SMTP2Go instead. (Do I have an affiliate link? Hm… probably somewhere.)
You can obtain the best deliverability and spam-score with Sendy.
The only "bad" thing I have to say about it, is that there are limitations. If you make something simple, you cannot do complex things also. And it doesn’t have the strong segmenting options other ESPs have.
You can’t send to unopeners either.
At least not easily. Plus it doesn’t do clean txt. Only HTML and txt together.
That said, I highly recommend Sendy if you dare to go self-hosted.
Some people don’t.
Personally, I prefer to be in full control.
You can get Sendy here ==> https://clq.cx/sendy