We have managed email, both direct and list, for the thirty years we've been in existence. Initially we distributed avalanche advisories for many US Forest Service centers, the Canadians, and the Swiss. Nobody else knew how to do it. We used majordomo, which had no web interface built it. (The web was new at the time anyway.) Later the government people figured things out and there was no need for us to do that. We tried using mailman, a Python program, but it was not very smooth. Then, until recently, we used a commercial service called MadMimi. This seemed to work ok, although we only now found some problems with it. And it's not free, although we kept our mailings below the initial free allotment.
Over the past few months we have implemented an in-house mail system again, with a robust web management interface. We are now using that, and in the coming season we will be able to make regular mailings with no per-message cost. But this transition has been an adventure. We've had to learn about spf, dkim and dmarc records (which was had mostly right for our own servers) and we found that the major email providers often bounce mail for no good reason. Especially hotmail/msn and pacbell/sbcglobal/att. The msn issue seems fixed, the att related ones may not be.
Our mail comes from different servers as well, and if you want to be sure to receive our mail you can whitelist the domains csac.org and avalancheassociation.org.
What follows is a summary of our systems, and of the problems and technicalities. If you have problems this might explain them, and for anyone managing their own email this may be helpful.
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