What's the upper limit of recipients for a 3rd party solution like MailChimp? I manage the infrastructure of a newsletter that's sent to over 2 million recipients in a 12 hour deliverability window, and it didn't look like 3rd party solutions came anywhere close to hitting this. I looked around briefly but no services seemed to come anywhere close.

They normally can accomodate for that, but they don't show you pricing on their site. Basically, you'd have to contact them and talk about your specific needs. But I don't believe companies like Mailchimp, Aweber, and SendGrid would turn you down.

Yep if you contact them directly you can get direct pricing on any sized list. If you contact me (emails in my HN profile) I can put you in touch with our guy lance at Mailchimp

(Make sure to put your email in the about box, otherwise it is hidden)

whoops, done!

There are plenty of services around that are capable of this sort of throughput. But I suspect you'd be better off with one catering to larger companies (rather than the Mailchimp/CampaignMonitor type that primarily deal with large number of smaller clients).

I wrote this in response to a HN member who asked me how we got started with our email newsletter. If your interested in starting an email newsletter business or just curious about the industry check out the post.

Thanks for taking the time to write the article.

Yeah, thanks for this post and your other case studies you have done Chris. Also thank you for the couple tips you have sent me via email. Very helpful!

Chris (Cmccann7) was fantastic on the phone. I really can't speak highly enough of him. He responded to my email, took the phone call, explained patiently what he did and then wrote up an entry about it. Thank you again Chris for being so supportive.

Thanks Sebastian :) A lot of new entrepreneurs ask me this same question and I figured instead of repeating myself each time, why not write a blog post about it!

Goodluck with your newsletter business!

Realizing that starting an email newsletter company is costless and doesn't have to distribute only news is actually a big idea. There's a ton of businesses to be made around distributing curating publicly available content, and being able to serve members of a community you really love is a rare, awesome opportunity.

The HackerNews digest (I think that's what the HN newsletter is called) is a great example of this. Curated and sent to my inbox to keep me up to date on all of the HN discussions, I love recieving it.

I think you are referring to the newsletter I started up a month ago - Hacker Newsletter, http://www.hackernewsletter.com

(And thanks!)

I just started a newsletter list for guys with girlfriends. Make your Girlfriend Happy: http://makeyourgirlfriendhappy.com we give you useful reminders about your anniversary and her birthday plus weekly ideas to help make her happy.

Let me know what you think.

I think if you need an email reminder about anniversaries/birthdays your relationship is pretty much shot. But maybe some of the other stuff could be useful for me.

I think you need to make the past content much more visible on the site so users get an idea of what they're signing up for. You really aren't creating any interest for the user unless you do that.

How do these companies monetize their lists? (Please forgive me if this is common knowledge.)

A post is coming on this topic soon.. But based on what I have seen the short answer is direct advertising, ecommerce, or paid subscription.

Thanks Chris. (I'm running a brand new niche email newsletter for patent attorneys and would enjoy chatting if you have the time. My email is in my profile.)

Can't see your email, make sure to put it in your about section (can't see it otherwise). Send me a note, mine is in my about section.

From the few examples I've had the numbers on in this field, their CPMs are sky high compared to Web advertising, so having people "sponsor" certain mailings can pay off in a way it doesn't on the Web.

We did a podcast interview with Chris McCann of StartupDigest just a couple weeks ago. Lots of interesting topics were covered. It's well worth a listen.

http://techzinglive.com/?p=243

And if your looking for a new podcast to follow, TechZing is a great one

if you use mailchimp to send emails, why would you also need ReturnPath for deliverability?

Deliverability is seperate from just sending out the emails. Deliverability is the business of making sure your email was actually sent and recieved to your subscribers.

Deliverability itself is a big industry and return path is the leader in the field. Mailchimp resells Return Path as it's "inbox checker" product which we use to analyze our emails to make sure we aren't tripping off spam filters.

In this case, deliverability is MailChimp's job...not ReturnPath's. MailChimp says so on their site. They have feedback loops with ISPs to show you opens, bounces, spam complains etc.

The "Inbox Inspector" add-on shows screenshots of what your email looks like in a handful of email clients and runs what I'm guessing is a SpamAssassin check that returns a spamminess number. If this add-on is from ReturnPath, then the service they are providing isn't exactly "deliverability" once you've sent --- it's really a toolkit to inspect and QA your messages BEFORE you send them.

ReturnPath's stuff is a bit more advanced than that. They give you a large list of email addresses to send to (consisting of a number of webmail clients and ISPs). They then pick these up and provide stats on which have and haven't been delivered. They also ran your content through a number of spam filters (including, but not limited to SpamAssassin).

They also provide a whitelisting service (previously the "Bonded Sender" programme) which helps deliverability in a lot of cases, but the primary benefit is that it's pretty much the only way to guarantee delivery of large quantities of email to Hotmail.

So, they are closely involved with deliverability, but you're right in saying that it's down to Mailchimp to keep their sending IPs reputation clean.