I've got a significantly large mailing list - 50K+ subscribers. To avoid stressing my servers, I would like to avoid sending emails through a components embedded on my website. Sending through here sends the CPU usage through the roof - so I'd like to be able to send emails locally. I can easily send emails through mandrillapp, so sending the emails out is not a problem. However, I've hit a bit of a snag.
Phplist seems to assume it is living on a public site, and inserts tracking info which routes the users to a phplist directory on my site (which obviously) does not exist.
Question 1: First of all, I'd like to avoid embedding this tracking - is this possible? Or else is there someway to include it and avoid the 404 error. Would I have to install phplist anyway on the server?
Question 2: I've already got acymailing to handle unsubscribes, so is it actually possible to keep this in place - just to make sure the acymailing is still my point of reference?
Question 3: How do people handle sending out large mailing lists? I know CampaignMonitor, MailChimp etc, but these get a bit expensive for my situation. I'd like to keep sending "internally" so to speak. Is there an elegant solution which will NOT kill my server but is not too expensive? I know I want to have the cake and eat, but it would be nice to hear what people out there are doing.
TIA David