Question : Email blast? 300+ recipients....where to start?

We would like to send out a solicited e-mail blast to a little over 300 people.

We dont have an exchange server or SQL database or anything (offsite pop3 email hosting) - so we will have to do this via a third party, right?

The e-mail blast is nothing too complicated or fancy, just a update sent to some regular patrons of our restaurant.

If someone can inform me how this works so I can relay this info, it would be great!

 Is there software used for doing email blasts or do we have to find a third party?

Answer : Email blast? 300+ recipients....where to start?

There are plenty of third party offers out there for a mass mail campaign. Here is one as an example.
http://search.constantcontact.com/index.jsp


You could run it yourself but it would take a little technical skilll to setup the mail server and a software to handle the mail list. Do you have any experience with Linux? If so you could use a program such as Majordomo, or Mailman to handle the list.