Email Marketing: Constant Contact Is Lame

I've been using Constant Contact for my newsletter mailing list for quite a while, but unfortunately I need to find another service to handle it... here's why:

CC allows you to create nice HTML emails, they have a variety of templates, it's easy to edit the templates... so far, very nice. CC converts URLs in the email to tracking links, so that you can count click-throughs. Again, so far, so good... It's nice to be able to track clicks, send follow-ups, etc. If the subscriber has opted to receive an HTML version of the newsletter.

The problem comes in when subscribers elect to receive a text-only version. Instead of just putting the URLs in as plain text (which would be the non-stupid approach), CC takes the stupid approach and puts tracking links in, which are extremely long and contain encoded characters.

This renders every URL in the newsletter unreadable, unusable, and unclickable for those receiving a text version. This can't be fixed by using shorter URLs, because the tracking code adds more than 55 characters to every URL, and the lines are wrapped at 55 characters in the text emails.

How hard would it be to use a non-stupid approach, or at least give customers a "non-stupid" setting? I don't know, but apparently it's too much for the folks at Roving Software Incorporated, dba Constant Contact.

In fact, it's not even possible for me to create a separate text-only version of the newsletter to fix the problem by hand. I can't even tell which subscribers, or how many, have chosen to receive a text-only version... so I have no idea how much the lack of non-stupidity is costing me.

Readers of this blog are invited to comment and recommend non-stupid email marketing solutions. Some things I need:

• I don't want to hear how great Mailloop is. Don't bother telling me about any stinkin' desktop software, I want a web-based solution.
  
• Subscribers should be able to choose either an HTML or text version, and receive a non-stupid email when I send my newsletter no matter which version they selected. Ideally, I shouldn't have to create an entirely separate text version by hand.
  
• I need the ability to import my subscriber list from Constant Contact in some way.
• I would like to be able to track and follow up on click-throughs. By follow up, I mean sending a second email to those who have clicked a particular link in an email campaign.
  
• Subscriber interest groups, so we can send out special announcements on different services to those who actually want them.
• The service needs to be able to send to 10,000+ subscribers in a reasonable amount of time, allow the emails to be scheduled in advance, and have the standard deliverability features (like authentication) that email marketers expect.
• Almost forgot, another non-stupid feature, let me set a "thank you" URL instead of trying to send the visitor back to the referring URL. Thanks.
  

That's about it... If someone from Roving / Constant Contact would like to offer a solution, I'll be happy to listen, but your first level tech support didn't have a solution so if one exists you might want to let them know right after you explain it to me.