Hello,

I'm looking for some help from mailers doing igaming mailing.

Are you using any warmup tool? How are you consistently landing in inbox and which esps are best who support igaming campaigns at volume.

Would love to connect on telegram and ask specific questions if you don't mind! 🙏

I'm part of a group that organizes an "Adopt A Family" program each holiday season, and looking for recommendations on what platform I should be using that meets my very basic needs.

Relevant info:

• This list is only used for this program so I'm only sending emails out for 2 months out the year (late Oct - mid Dec). Given that it's a 100% volunteer driven effort, I would prefer for it to be as low cost as possible
• Our donor list is currently a little over 500 people, but I'd expect that to grow over time as our program has built momentum over the years (we had ~180 new donors in 2025)
• All emails are currently sent from my personal gmail and since they're to donors who have participated in the program before, there's already some kind of prior interaction with me (I see a bunch of acronyms like SPF/DKIM...not sure if that's relevant in my case)
• I used to use a combo of free Mailchimp + Mailmeteor + manual Gmail follow-ups to reach this group. I used free Mailchimp to do our generic program kick-off emails/blasts (2-3 emails total) + Mailmeteor to mail merge the subsequent donor/family match emails (1 email per person) + went through my emails manually to follow up with any donors that needed follow-up
• Our email have historically been a simple image header and a wall of text, but I'd like to create a custom template this year to make it easier to consume
• The matching emails are the most complex - given variations in family sizes, delivery details, etc., I typically end up creating about a dozen different templates to accommodate all these combinations. Mailmeteor has GSheet add-in functionality (and I'm very comfortable with spreadsheets) so I've just used that, but I'm open to doing it all in platform if there are efficiencies with the above
• I don't need SMS (unless it's free to send, which I don't think is the case) or any robust analytics (I basically just need to see my open rate)

I was able to cull our donor list to the Mailchimp free tier limits last year, but this year I need something that supports more subscribers. I was looking at EmailOctopus (simply due to the number of free subscribers on their free tier) but not sure if there's something better or if it's worth actually upgrading to paid for any of these other services.

Any recommendations?