PHPlist setup help .... or other e-mail marketing software?
 

Hello guys,

I would like to ask you for an advice regarding e-mail newsletter service. We've built our new site on WP and I would like to offer a decent newsletter option for my visitors. I would simply send them one mail weekly with updates, offers, etc. The list should be double opt in and easy to manage.

I have already done some research about various options and so far I was thinking that PHPList might be my way to go. To be honest I am totally inexperienced web developer and webmaster, one month ago I didn't know anything about technical stuff... But recently we had to build a new WP site by ourselves so I had to learn a lot and I am learning a lot everyday and probably will never stop learning, lol. I am saying this only to make clear that although I don't have any experience with e-mail marketing software and marketing whatsoever, I am willing to dive into these fields and set up everything by myself (if it wouldn't be beyond my scope...).

Having said that I would like to ask you for your help with PHPlist or any other service you think might be useful for me. I was able to install and configure PHPlist with no problems on my main domain (the same one I am using for my site) on Hostgator's VPS server.. Everything was fine until I tried to send test e-mails to my gmail account. All of the e-mails were marked as spam even thought I made sure there were no ad-words, etc. I was a bit horrified by this as I obviously can't keep sending my newsletter to my customer's spam box... That's why I would like to ask you whether you could help me with this issue. Am I doing some fundamental mistake? Like with the domain or so? How do you prevent your e-mails being marked as spam? Are there many technical things to be done before I would be able to start sending the newsletter? If yes, I might probably just go for the Ynot mail software... Right now I don't have much money and that was the primary reason for me to look for the free PHPlist solution. Yet I am hoping that once my new site will be up and I will start to finally do some marketing, I will be able to afford Ynot mail without problems if PHPlist won't work for me. I am sorry for such a long post..:-/ and would very much appreciate your help. All the best from Misha