freeautobot Has it gone?

Stay away from free autoresponders.

1) They're free so you don't want to build a list and see it vanish into thin air one day (if freeautobot really is gone, imagine how many people's efforts just got flushed).

2) Your emails will either NOT get delivered, or end up in people's SPAM folder. I remember signing up for an e-course over a year ago (powered by freeautobot) and it still hasn't made it in my inbox (didn't go to my spam box either).

3) Most place ads in your emails. I don't know about you, but when it comes to list building, my philosophy is that TRUST is the most important thing, and it takes an effort to earn it by sending high quality information and recommending GREAT products.

Who knows what in the world YOU will be promoting to your list when your autoresponder service is placing ads in your emails?

All of the reasons above should say that you should stay away from using free autoresponder services at all costs.

If you can't afford a paid one right now, I'd personally save up and buy a year's subscription to a paid one before I use a free autoresponder.

Kudos for making an effort to build a list though, make sure to do it right and take care of them once they subscribe! Don't be the kind to push offer, after offer, after offer, etc.

Take care of your list and it will take care of you ;-)

-Jonathan Beebe

If you want free, a couple good ones have free services for the
first 500. These offers do change. Look at MailChimp - but
if you use it carefully review their terms of services, because
it is hostile to affiliate marketers.

There are also some free scripts you can run on your own hosting
account.

Parabots Autoresponder System
was a paid product but is now free. I believe the developer grew
weary of supporting it, but from what I've read it works well.

The argument for using Aweber or Getresponse or other premium
pay-as-you-go is your deliverability will be excellent and you get
some nice features.

But really, it's your email project and deliverability may be less
important to you than it is to some of us. I could see how, if
for instance you were running a local charity and had nothing
for sale, you wouldn't want to spend money on a service to
deliver email when you could do it for free.

You can also run email programs from your desktop and I have
read that the bulk email features in Yahoo mail are not bad
at all, just a little labor intensive. If your list is small you can
get by with no-cost solutions for awhile.

A fellow Warrior runs http://vertuso.com/
which is free for the first 500 names on your list. I signed up
to check it out for curiosity. It doesn't have a lot of features
but may work well.

Hi ChunkyNuts,

In my opinion, I would still go for paid autoresponders since it will always ensure you of the anti-spam laws. Although if you would want a free service for your split testing, I found a good autoresponder which you can try for free on your first 100 list. Once you gathered good results, extend it to its paid version so you'll get more of its features.

See it from this article in Ezine:

Should I Use a Free Auto Responder Service?

Good luck.