There is a big difference between the 5500+ spam mails I received in one day and sending a newsletter to a list of subcribers. I abhor spammers but I manage and moderate a large medical/educational listserv with 400+ members sharing 50 to 100 letters daily.
I use my own server running Mailman software under Linux. It is easy to manage and has worked well for us.
There are a number of free listservers you can use such as Yahoo Groups. Go to www.yahoo.com and click on Groups. You can set up you own group there. You can restrict communications or make it wide open. Your "group" becomes a continual newsletter.
With my listserv, I have the list restricted to subscribers only. They can manage their own subscriber accounts and mail discussions flow freely. I only intervene if someone forgets the rules of civility and tempers begin to flare. I have very rarely had to unsubscribe and ban someone from the list. The members generally live in highly stressful conditions and occasionally a chain can be rattled. It is the Moderator's job to keep the peace but not to act as censor board unless absolutely necessary.
We all strive to cultivate the list as a "family", sharing information, support, experience and resources. It has worked well for 11 years.
Each members is also a research resource for the group reporting on any related news, research, legislation, etc. The Listserv becomes a 24/7 conference facility.
The downside is that I normally deal with about 1000 spam letters daily as my e-mail address gets harvested from my website. My spam filters catch most of it but I still have to check the Junk mailbox to make sire it has not captured important legitimate mail. It can be a bit wearing. A spammer took my domain name attached random names before the @ symbol in the e-mail address and placed those in the Reply To field. They then bombarded every server from here to Tibet with junk mail. When the server did not recognize the To: name in the address field it would bounce the notice back to the Reply To: address, anyname@mydomain.com. Most domains have a slush box that accepts any mail addressed to that domain in case somebody misspelled the intended recipient's name. Sorting this out is the proverbial rock and a hard place problem.
