How Do You Get Started With a Mailing List?
My friend's mom needs to replace her old mailing list wordpress plugin and I said I could help. However, the first 100 pages of search results are just seo spam and I can't find good information about how to do it.
What is the proper way to make a mailing list? Do you need a third party service to avoid getting sent to the spam box? Who are the best providers? I am a software developer, so a techincal guide would be ideal, but I'm just a little blind here in general
Since you are a technical person, here is the lay of the land
To improve your sender reputation and deliverability, I strongly recommend that you Set up domain authentication with your email provider and set up a few DNS TXT records (requires access to DNS Zone of your domain) to allow your email provider to sign outgoing email using DKIM and DomainKeys, and will inform your contacts' email providers that they are allowed to send your emails
Set up SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
An SPF record lists all servers that are allowed to send emails from your domain.
Read more about SPF here:
https://documentation.mailjet.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042561514-What-s-the-meaning-of-SPF-Sender-Policy-Framework-
Set up DomainKeys/DKIM (Domain Key Identified Mail)
This is provided by email provider as a key value/pair that you have to setup as a TXT records in your DNS Zone area of Your web Host
This record contains a public key, used by receivers to check email really comes from an authorized sender.
Read more about DKIM here:
https://documentation.mailjet.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042561474-What-s-the-meaning-of-DKIM-
The above may be highly technical for a non-techie. But since you stated that yoiu are technical, I try to give it to you straight. Hope this helps.
This stuff isn't required if you're not using your own domain. The shorter and simpler answer is sign up for a Mailchimp account and use them to create your mailing list. If you do have a domain there are some steps for authenticating: https://mailchimp.com/help/set-up-email-domain-authentication/
Summarizing:
If you're starting off, yes just do that.
Up for debate, but the cheapest/simplest is probably Mailchimp.
If your friend's mom was using an existing provider, simplest option is to keep using that.