Alternative to Simplenews, or a way to send formatted mailing lists to subscribers?
Check out the new Newsletter module.

Features

Multiple newsletters lists configurable on terms, not vocabularies
Plain text or HTML out of the box
Multiple schedules Each newsletter can have more than one schedule, e.g. Daily, Monthly, Weekly, manually or even custom, eg after 10 new posts for this term.
Centralized administration and configuration on single page.
Users can customize the terms in the list they subscribe to
Custom template per list
Statistics (CTR and Open-Rate)
Drupal 7 only