I am the general manager of a restaurant and we send out weekly and monthly emails to people who sign up for our email list at the restaurant. We now have over 800 contacts in our email list but I can only send out 500 a day so my emails have to be sent over several days which prohibits me from sending emails in a timely manner. I need a solution.

Use Google Groups http://groups.google.com/ or a blog converted to a newsletter using FeedBurner: http://feedburner.google.com . It's a really bad idea to use an email service like Gmail to send newsletters. Not to mention that it's difficult to manage subscribers.

Ionut, blogposts autoconverted to feed items are certainly the most bit-efficient way of spreading periodical information, but how does one convince existing and future recipients to resubscribe in such a way that they still receive it within the "mail" stream? It may well be done with one or two specific RSS-aware browsers, but I doubt Brandon would welcome having to educate his customers about that, too. As far as I know there is no straightforward, easy RSS-way to do it. Email is still the lowest, and most often the only common denominator where simple mass-messaging is converned. I like your suggestion of setting up a private Google group better (or a Yahoogroups one for that matter), but even that requires a degree of knowledge for maintenance purposes.....

Assuming it'd be easy to automate at his end, I think what Brandon would feel most comfortable with would be channeling the mailings through more than a single SMTP gateway instead. That, or an Enterprize account which would not carry such arbitrary limits.

Google Groups has a feature that allows admins to add members. Click on "invite members", select "Add members directly" and enter the list of email addresses.

Or go ahead and create a mailman mailing list on your domain. Your webmaster might help you doing this

You could also sign up with http://Mailchimp.com (paid, but works – they handle your subscribes and unsubscribes, offer email preview screenshots from dozens of clients, offer campaign stats and more).

In Google Apps for your own domain, evert account can send 500 mails/day. Solution: Create a new account for every 500 subscriber you have.