Thread: newsletter software

i have a part time project which uses an email list ( currently around 300 ) ... before i used to just send out a basic email with a couple of images in it but the latest one i did in a newsletter style and built a template in thunderbird .. however i got into huge difficulties ( i wont bore you with all the details) and i am now under the impression that what i need is mailing list software. Any ideas or guidance appreciated. (i know someone will say that i need to just go and research this myself but i would really appreciate any help and i just thought that people on this list would have plenty of experience with all this - i have already spent may hours longer than i thought i would have to and the mail was suppoed to be sent yesterday)

here's what i need ( and i know this is possibly a tall order but if it out there great and if it's not then obviously i will have to compromise somewhere )

• it has to be 100% freeware - (that's free not cheap thanks -there is zero money available unless it's the world on a string for a fiver or something )
• this is the most important - it needs to be capable of importing and exporting lists, preferably csv but i'd settle for anything
• the software needs to be able to handle "dead" email addresses without dieing itself ( thunderbird seems to be not able to manage this - it errored out on some slightly non descript error for one of the emails on the list and didnt tell me whether it had sent the mail to the others on the list - i need to know what's been sent, what errored out and why etc.
• i need something that will allow me to build an email in it ( ie table layout with images etc ) wysiwyg is great but if there was an editor as well then that would be too good to be true
• needs to be reasonable at cross client formatting so that people who use gmail, outlook, yahoo etc will all see roughly the same thing ( thunderbird was a little bit hairy on this front i think )
• it would be great if there was some kind of way of managing unsubscribes

thanks

ps finally i may well be missing some important point so please feel free to point it out to me

in case anyone wonders why i am going the desktop software route i have found that thunderbird despite how much i love it does not work that well, online systems are limited to 500 and 1000 users and though our list is only 300 we really hope to grow it and i dont want to have to move, or get people to resubscribe to another system. I did think of using a mailing list on a wordpress installation but im not convinced that it's the best way to do it either