What are the pros and cons to a WordPress run newsletter v. third party newsletter?

I am currently building a site that will use newsletters, email notifications for new posts and email notifications for new comments on posts.

I keep going back and forth between running this through third party sites and doing it solely through my WordPress website. I should mention, when I say third party, I am including the WrodPress.com email/comment subscriptions built into Jetpack, maybe FeedBurner for new post emails instead and I am considering MailChimp.com for newsletters.

If running it myself, I haven't decided on any plugins yet, but I know plenty are available.

I suppose my main reasoning for wanting to run everything myself is so I can have a more fine level of control. I can email specific user roles, etc. As well, I am not a big fan of the double opt-in used by MailChimp and Jetpack. Double opt-in simply annoys me. I prefer ReCaptcha or some other anti-spam method on the signup form

I have been trying to come up with pros and cons on each side, other than double opt-in (which I understand, can be a pro or con for both depending on your views), what are pros and cons of each method?

Thanks.

Topic newsletter notifications subscription Wordpress

Category Web

1
answered at

If you predict many subscribers then going 3rd party is the only way, and by 3rd party I mean companies that specialize in bulk mail sending and have an API to control it. The API should satisfy your need for fine control. Wordpress.com and feedburner are not the kind of services I'm thinking of here.

You can use WP for newsletters as long as you send text only mail (formatted as text or html), but once you send images you need to start dealing with traffic picks you are not used to when running your site. If you embed the image in the mail you will basically send it to each of your subscribers which will result in outgoing traffic surge which might annoy your upstream provider. If you leave it on your server and just refer to it with an IMG tag in your mail, then your server might get hammered by receiving tens of request for the image at virtually the same time.

The ultimate solution in my opinion is to do the user registration on WP side, and use experts to handle the actual transmission.

But then, if you are going to have only tens of subscribers then you can probably DIY without getting into real problem as long as you handle the spam related stuff correctly.

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