IMHO, email servers can be a "real pain in the tail". Unless you are prepared to install/configure/maintain an email server and mailing list management application, you are better off with a mailing list service provider such as mailchimp. I know mailchimp gives you up to 2,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails per month for free. If you are below those numbers, it's a "no brainer". If your numbers are bigger, mailchimp may still be cost effective. You would have to have a "HUGE" mailing list requirement to justify the expense of a dedicated standalone mailing list server.

Ok, Thank you.

But with a standard mail server (automatically rent with a standard hosting), what are the risks ? (spams,...)

I guess the question is "what are your trying to do?". A monthly mailer sending a newsletter to all the Concrete5 registered users? A full blown mailing list?

Mailing List provides you a way to gather email addresses but goes no further, unless you have the paid version. But if all you are after is the email list then at its most basic form this will collect those for you.

Mail Chimp is an api that connects to a mail chimp account,
Mail chimp handles email signups/newsletters/email campaigns. Using mail chimp you are tied to there terms but email sending is what they do best.
I have not used the paid version of Mailing list so cannot give my opinion of it but I have used the mail chimp addon and its very easy to use.
Personally I would go with that method if you are planning on sending out emails.

Mail chimp does has a limited amount of emails you can send on the Free account, I assume the mailing List addon does not.

Ok.

My client has a mailing list that is growing more and more. Actually 5000 subscribers.

I don't think he is ready to pay 75$ for a MailChimp monthly plan.

It's for that I need to know if I should move towards a system rather MailChimp staff.

PHPList http://www.phplist.com/
is a very sophisticated PHP script that may do what you want. You might even get away with running it on your current web host. They might not like it. You may have to rent an email server and run PHPList on it :) Just an idea.

Seanom: There is only a paid version for the "Mailing List" package. Yes, it does offer a block for subscriptions, and can subscribe both registered and unregistered users, optionally capture their user attributes (I believe these are something that two mailchimp alternatives lack), and it also has all the other necessary sending/subscription/management functionality.

I do somewhat agree with nteaviation, there are potential issues with people running this kind of package from their own servers. Occasionally a server's DNS records aren't set up correctly or their IP address is blacklisted, and in these instances mail can be treated as spam. Another potential problem that some users run into is that their server can only send out so many mailings at a time. however there is an auto-restart option for this, and turning on concrete's SMTP option normally fixes this issue. That said these problems do seem to be a minority of users, and I'm happy to offer refunds to those who run into these problems.

I'm may be a little biased on this since I developed the Mailing List package, but my recommendation is that if this is for a big company with tens to hundreds of thousands of mailings, or if you don't mind the recurring monthly fee, then go with the mail chimp add-on. If this is for small to mid sized companies sending out 100s-1,000s of mailings at a time, or if you want to avoid that recurring monthly fee, then the mailing list package may be better suited. Some of the individual features probably differ between the two as well, with the Mailing List package offering tighter integration with the rest of concrete (like sending to users of a particular group or those with a given user attribute), and the MailChimp package probably does a good job of leveraging of some of the robust functionality of that system (like bounce tracking). hope that helps!

Thank you !

And for 5000s ? ^^

I would *strongly* encourage your client to spend the $75/month with Mailchimp or one of the other services out there (Constant Contact, MyEmma, etc.) -- especially for a list size of 5,000 subscribers. Email lists are probably the most valuable online marketing tool available (because supposedly they have all voluntarily signed up to receive info from your client -- hopefully :). If that's not worth $75/mo., then your client should seriously reconsider their priorities.
The problem with running your own email service isn't so much a technical one as it is a getting-around-spam-prevention one. There are a *lot* of things you need to do in order to set things up on your server properly so that other people don't think you're sending spam. And there are a *lot* of things you need to check with the content of the emails specifically to make sure they won't trigger anti-spam measures on various clients. And there are a *lot* of things you need to do to make sure the email itself will be readable across the myriad of clients out there (Outlook, Apple Mail, GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) -- IE6 is a walk in the park compared to email clients!
All of these things are handled for you by these email services. If this is something you even want to take on yourself (which I wouldn't recommend because it's the most annoying grunt work I've ever experienced and there's not even any way to verify if you've done it right because email systems don't usually tell you when they think you're spam -- instead you just might maybe hear from some customers if you're lucky that they haven't gotten anything recently), the amount of time involved would vastly outweigh the $75/month or whatever it is for an email service.
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot -- how are you going to handle reporting? And what about A/B tests? Those are things the services provide as well which maybe your client isn't asking for now but surely will in the future.

Just my opinion (obviously I feel strongly about this, though -- I've sent weekly lists of over 100,000 subscribers for Fortune 100 companies before -- trust me, you don't want to deal with all the hassles!)

-Jordan

For an example of the ridiculousness involved in getting an email server set up right (or for details on what to do if you actually decide to tackle this on your own), see:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-send-some-...

I definitely agree with jordanlev. I have spent many man hours just configuring, testing and tweaking our domain email server. Email servers are a breed of their own and if I could third party it out, I would. Add in the requirement of a mass mailer and things can get really tricky and tedious.

@tony, sorry I must be thinking of the Email List Signup block by Jordan

I can echo the thoughts of everyone here though we send out bulk emails on our server, we have now upgraded it so that it sends more at once but we used to get into problems when sending thousands in one go, the server would queue the emails up also meaning our incoming emails would get held up along with our outgoing emails.

A recent client also had there system infected with mal-ware that started spamming our server with spam emails we noticed it in less then a day but that was enough to get our server blacklisted on a few sites. We have since managed to get off those lists by beefing our security up but it is a pain.

We now suggest our clients use Mail Chimp for large bulk email campaigns as they are better suited for it.

-- I do know someone at work, that was working on a script to send out so many emails at once via a variable timer class, so that the system does not clog up the server all at once. Ill see if they managed to finish it and will let me share the code? it wasn't in c5 so would need tweaking but could help when dealing with large numbers of emails on your own server

I hear you on that, a blacklisted ip can be a real a pain in the ass. just to be clear though, the mailing list package does actually have throttling options so that you can limit the number of emails that are sent out at a time, the pause time between each mailing burst, and the max run time, so it shouldn't backlog the server unless those settings are set way too aggressive.