Email list issues

The biggest impediment to me starting this blog earlier was finding a name I was happy with. I will see how this works.

I am trying to set up a mass email list. I want to send a few hundred people emails and make sure they do not land in their spam folders. Sending personalized emails is an option I want to keep open. I am working with phplist, which is a free program I found online. I installed it a few months ago, but when I tried to use it there was a problem. The browser was not rendering it correctly, and the pages had huge chunks of code displayed. Earlier today I deleted everything I had and downloaded the latest version. Now the problem has gone away.

There is one new problem. I cannot add text to a message I want to send. I can change the subject, reply to, header, footer, time to send, who to send to, almost everything except the content of the message. When I tab down the page to where the text field should be for the content, it selects a huge box or frame of some kind, but I cannot write in it. Since the program will not let me send an email without a message, I cannot even test this.

I did some looking for other mass email programs online but made no progress. I found a few I could buy, a site that claimed the only way to do it was with AOL (just say NO to AOL), and even a library of php scripts (PHPMailer) which is used by the aforementioned phplists.

That is the major issue at this point.

I will wait to publicize this blog for a little bit. I want to wait until I get in the habit of posting and get a better idea of what I want to write about. Until then I will try to relay the interesting incidents of my life here.