Through our relationship with Door 22 we've been involved with a number of e-newsletters. Thus far all the clients had an existing mechanism for sending these, either through a CRM package or else a mass-mailing feature on their web site.
However, with the latest request no such mechanism was available, so we had to find one. The first inclination was to use Word + Outlook to do an email merge. The problem with this was that the HTML was constructed externally using Dreamweaver. When this gets loaded into Word then Word starts to apply its own rather peculiar ideas about HTML to the source code, resulting in all the table structures going awry. Another possibility was just to use Outlook, loading the HTML in via Insert -> File with the Insert As Text option. However, that provides no mail merge option so the whole mailing list would have to go in bcc, thereby increasing the likelihood of getting trapped by the spam filters.
So, we went looking for a third-party solution and decided to buy e-Campaign from Lmhsoft. It's easy to use and quite flexible. You can merge in data from the mailing list to personalise each email. You can choose to either have your images hosted externally (for a small email size) or embedded (so that the email will still display correctly when the machine is not connected to the internet). It also has it's own SMTP server built-in or else you can connect to your regular one. In summary we would recommend it.
The information is provided 'as is'. It has worked for us,
but it may not work for you, so you use it at your own risk. We can't
enter into any correspondance about anything recorded here but please feel free to leave a comment.
Geographical coverage: AlphaOne Computing Services
provides a range of small business computer support and I.T. services throughout Sussex, including
Brighton, Hove, Shoreham, Worthing, Steyning, Burgess Hill,
Haywards Heath, Crawley, Lewes, Newhaven, Seaford, Uckfield and Eastbourne.
