I have never wrote newsletters and I do not intend on starting, I send an email or two per year when we are celebrating our birthday or something amazingly exciting is about to start
I do not write newsletters, primarily because whenever you see or hear about them, it is people moaning most of the time. So for that reasons, newsletters will not be a part of my community anytime soon!
I used to do a newsletter when I ran another forum however it can be quite time consuming and it was something that I only ever really did once a month if I remembered and had the time. They are great to have if you have the time to do them especially if you have alot of members as it's a great way to keep them updated about the goings on, on your forum. I now only tend to send an email once ever so often and usually ones on special occasions such as Christmas, New Year, Easter, July 4th, Halloween and Thanksgiving and we also send them out if we have something big and new happening or it's our anniversary.
I try to limit my emails to members to once a month or less. Occasionally I will write a newsletter but its like how twitter used to do it, maybe 4 issues a year. If you send too much email, you start to annoy people and there are a lot of newbie forum owners that make that mistake... I did when I first started out.
True about the annoyance factor, one gets irritated and they mark the mails as spam eventually... so keep it limited is the key, but if you've great things to share such as deals, discounts, then you should be ignoring this.
I agree that they are good if you have a big community. I also think that you might make them a bit more interesting. I personally am not annoyed by them.
I don;t got time for making newsletters, may be members can check the website directly instead of that thing.