Email List Hosting

We are a small non-profit (High School PTA) and would like to sending weekly newsletters to our parents who are paid members and have provided an email address on their membership forms. Although we have about 2000 members, our list is about 800 subscribers. We expect this to max out at about 1500 over the next year or two. The newsletter is produced in MS Publisher and is sent as an ‘email message’ through outlook. Looked at email services – afford them right now.

I am looking for a hosting company/service that will allow:

1. Maximum deliverability -we have issues with Comcast and AOL. Surprisingly, yahoo and hotmail have been fine.

2. We do not want opt-in – we want to be able to add addresses. We tried yahoo groups but I kept battling parents who would let invitations expire and ask that I resend or those who requested that I ‘just’ add them because they had already provided their address or because are not email savvy enough to follow the links! Yahoo groups limits the number of address on their ‘free’ list and you can add only 10 members per day. This was fine when we had only 100-200 but cannot do this with a growing list.

3. Need to way to ‘manage’ the list – meaning see which email address received the newsletters successfully, which ones got rejected by individual’s filter, which ones were blocked by the providers, email address which are no longer valid, etc. Currently, I have no way (that I know of) to get this information. I do not know PHP scripts or cgi-bin scripts – am willing to learn if there is a simple tutorial here on the forum.

4. All other needs are minimal.