A friend of mine asked me which newsletter system to use for sending abt 2k emails abt once a week. I couldn’t immediately respond, so I gave it a small evaluation of current products. As prerequisite, the system should be in active development, run on a (web)server, easy to use (usability over features) and it would be nice to use it at lowcost or for free. This limited the selection a lot and I just want to present my final opinion:

My favorite and ‘winner’ is the NotOneBit.com Simple Mailing List. It’s written in PHP, simple, clean and really easy to use. Perfect for a small use-case like this. Check it out: http://www.notonebit.com/projects/mailing-list/

Actually I thought PHPlistis first choice, but I didn’t liked it usability at all - I wonder why it’s so popular?

OpenEMM has a nice website and pretends to be opensource, but somehow I wasn’t able to get a proper version to run and test. Looks more like fake to me… Update: see comments, apparently there’s lot’s of work going on and you can download it from sourceforge easily..

MailMan is quite popular, known as stable and high performant, but still I don’t like the backend. The whole software looks a bit outdated to me… c’mon it’s 2009!!!

Other systems may worth a look as not for free, so I didn’t test them:
http://www.mailingwork.de/
http://www.supermailer.de/
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/

Nice sources to check:
http://www.inmedias.de/download/Newsletter-Software.pdf
http://www.vwsoft.de/?sectionid=pgminfo&pgmid=3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_marketing_software