Happy user of mailchimp here...

I think his points are very valid, and I appreciate his "mailchimp might be perfect for you" comment. As someone who went from doing it in-house to Mailchimp, I'll offer some advice:

Try an email marketer first, and only bring it in-house if you find that the marketer can't do what you want or is too restrictive.

There are an infinite number of things to spend your time on, and sending emails (and having them look good, arrive, get stats, etc) is a huuuuge time sink. If mass emails are not the core of your business then you should be outsourcing it. Build your core, buy the rest.

I'd like to mention Campaign Monitor, a local to me (Sydney.AU) startup in this area. They've addressed at least a few of those issues. items 1, 2, 4, and 5 are not problems with them, and 6 and 8 probably aren't a problem either if you don't consider connecting via their API "hard".

(No affiliation apart from being a very satisfied customer/user)

Awesome watch.

I am the Product Manager of PostageApp (http://www.postageapp.com) and we're under heavy development still, but it's always good to hear the problems that heavy users are running into with email solutions / marketing companies.

Definitely going to write them down and see how we can make sure we solve some of those problems.

Thanks Noah!

Using critsend here - precisely because I wanted the control I can only get with doing it inhouse. The 'value' that companies like icontact, mailchimp, etc. just isn't something that speaks to the needs of IT geeks. For certain people, it's obviously fine - possibly necessary - but far too limiting for developer/geeks.

Mailchimp & Campaign Monitor are the class of the bunch, you can't go wrong with either one. Easy templating, nice stats, A/B testing, autoresponders, API, good customer service.

iContact and Vertical Response are my next two favs, especially the latter if you send direct mail.

I've never used the enterprise solutions, but when I was researching for a client I was gravitating towards ExactTarget. You can do some pretty sophisticated rules for who gets sent what and when based on their behavior.

I can't watch the video right now, but is he talking about a specific provider? Those are definitely things to watch out for, but not all providers have those problems.

Every unsubscribe page should be like this http://www.groupon.com/austin/unsubscribe