On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 13:29, John Hardin <jhar...@impsec.org> wrote: > On Fri, 16 Oct 2009, John Rudd wrote: > >> Me. I work for one of their clients (a University). One or two of >> our divisions use them for large mailings to our internal users. > > How is Constant Contact better than (say) GNU mailman for that purpose? I > don't understand the concept of sending internal mail via an external third > party...
Don't ask me. I didn't recommend that they go down that path. I'm merely vouching that there are legitimate business users of the service. However, probably one of the reasons that they would give is: as clients of Contant Contact, they don't have to directly maintain mailman, an MTA, a server, and manage the capacity, maintenance, and bandwidth of all of that. Add in the cost of a sysadmin, and they probably think it's cheaper to go to Constant Contact than to pay for all of that (or to pay the Central IT Service (me) to do it for them ... though, in at least one case, I think they weren't aware of the options the central IT service could offer them ... that, or they were afraid we'd make them behave responsibly, and may not feel that they have to worry about that if they outsource, instead). Essentially, though, your question is the same as "why use Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail instead of (any of the many free POP/IMAP/Webmail software) that you can run yourself?" The answer, in both cases, is: outsourcing has a value, and this is one of the places where that's true for some people.
