If you do it yourself and you use your own list you can do it for next to nothing. If you use a service like Constant Contact, which is an excellent email service that I've recommended to different people to include a congressional candidate who now uses it, it isn't exactly cheap. It offers email campaign management, easy formatting and creation of email with graphics and other professional-looking elements, it tracks what emails get delivered, what gets bounced, and it even tracks the click-thrus on the links within the email. I know that if I was sending out campaign or fundraising emails to a large list, I wouldn't do it any other way.
There's a good possibility that Simcox purchased email "blast" services from the same company that he's using for direct mail and web-based donation services. And I'll bet they charge a pretty penny for rental of their email lists as they do their direct mail lists.
Thanks, that's part of what we've been saying.