I've got a forum with about 50,000 members and it takes a good 9 hours to email all of them now. I'm looking for a service that will not only send my monthly newsletter, but also handle tracking and other analytics for email.

Does anyone have any suggestions or experience with this sort of thing?

i am still using gmail and i am happy with it

What a service you offer nothing but nice.

There a different email application service providers out there research them all and choose the one that fits your needs. The main thing that they look for is the quality of the email list. As long as you have good data most of these email providers will accept but none of the major ones will accept any kind of spidered/harvested data. For an email application provider I like http://www.expeditesimplicity.com mainly for their speed and interface they are geared more to bulk mailing and have different packages based on the speed needed.

I'm also looking for what skyhawk is looking for now. I only have 5800 members but that's enough to annoy you when sending mass email. I'd like to have a lot of statistics around it as well.

Most providers will offer you stats such as who clicked a link inside the message. Which email opened a message (this is based on a tracking image embeded inside the message)
They will also be able to give you stats on which messages were accepted, timed out, blocked due to spam content, if the email address does not exist.

9 hours? Yikes. 50,000 members = 50,000 emails. I'm not aware of any service that would adequately cover this. Let us know if you do find it though. I'm not nearly as far along as you, but in the future I'm sure this will be something I'll also be faced with.

The service I mentioned above have packages that range from 1000 emails per month to sending 200 million emails per month. For the large accounts you can get about 10 broadcasters which allows each broadcaster to send around 1 to 1.4 million per day depending on the list quality. I am going to have an article soon on how to market products/sites with email marketing.

Gmail isn't going to help you on this. You're looking for a full-fledged campaign management solution.

To be honest, I worked with one company and didn't have much success. I think they folded as their domain brings up a parked page.

Try something like this:
http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp - a TON of companies use this
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/

HTH

and AWeber