Mass mailers review

This article will talk about things to look for when using mass mailer software. We will look into the difference between Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Publisher and SmartSerialMail. The first two are popular software that come with Microsoft Office. The last one is something you will have to buy.

Shortcuts to parts of the article:

1. 3rd party database integration
2. HTML code
3. Plain text code
4. Personalization
5. Bandwidth considerations
6. Compare the different applications
7. How Outlook works
8. How Publisher works
9. How SmartSerialMailer works

Integration with third party email-databases

In many cases you want to send out e-mails to other people than your primary contacts. Like responses to a survey on the Internet where the contact information is stored with an SQL server.

Often the software will import the email-database into its own format. When handling the life-cycle management of an e-mail you probably want to work directly towards the external database so changes applied there also are applied for the next distribution.

Some mass mailer software can read NDR's and update the database (block the e-mail address for future messages), but it won't do you any good if these changes are overwritten in the next import.

HTML code

If you like HTML coding you need full control of all aspects of the HTML code for the mail being sent. Many e-mail clients can only do simple formatting, which is very limited compared to what you can do with, for example, inline CSS.

Plain text

The plain text representation of an e-mail is always sent with the e-mail and is often just the text displayed with all formatting removed. Many clients can still only read the plain text version so you probably want to make a version of your message readable to those clients as well.

Most often you want to change how links to external pages are displayed and how tables are displayed in plain text.

Personalization of e-mails

If you want to make a personal invitation, like greeting the recipient by its first name or showing what e-mail address this e-mail was sent to you need personalization.

Bandwidth requirements

If you do this from home or any other place where you have limited bandwidth think of how the mails are sent. Is it sent one by one or many at one time?

If you have 100 recipients and sent out an e-mail that is 50kB in size you will transfer over 5MB to the Internet. This can take some time. If your recipient list is large enough - is your time window large enough for this?

If your mail software sends out one SMTP mail for these three recipients; a@a.com, b@a.com and a@b.com the SMTP server will optimize these reciptients into two SMTP messages when relaying; one for each domain.

If you send out one by one the relay will also do so.

Comparison guide

Feature	Outlook	Publisher	SmartSerialMail
3rd-party integration	No	Import	Import
HTML customization	No	No	Yes
Plain text	Automatically	Automatically	Full control
Personalization	No	Yes	Yes
Bandwidth	Efficient	Depends	Inefficient

Outlook

Outlook (in both Exchange and SMTP server mode), Outlook Express and Windows Mail are very similar when it comes to how e-mails are handled.

Outlook can import contacts from some external systems, but not databases. You have no control of how the embedded HTML code is made. The code is often ugly and unnecessary complex.

The plain text version is generated automatically based on the contents.

As you have no personalization options available if uses your bandwidth very effectively.

When your message is mostly text from top to bottom Outlook is a great tool.

Publisher

Microsoft Publisher works well with Outlook. As there is no mail support within Publisher it relays on MAPI to send mails. Outlook and Outlook Express are both MAPI enabled.

You have absolutely no control over the HTML code that is generated but you have a WYSIWYG GUI that does all the work for you. If something can't be displayed using HTML Publisher will create an image of the text and display it instead. (Like text rotated left.)

The plain text version tries to place the text at the same place as the HTML version. This gives you lots of spaces between sections of text. This format is not optimized for mobile phones or other clients with small display.

Publisher also has a design checker that informs you about potential problems with the format of your mail, like overlapping images.

You can choose if you want to personalize the message or not. But you have to do so if you want to use address book except for Outlook. The feature is called e-mail merge. If you choose to merge you can use your Outlook contact list, any SQL data source or create your own list.

SmartSerialMail

This mailer works only with its own database. You can however import from many different data sources, including the Outlook personal address book.

You create your e-mail using an HTML editor with basic formatting from the GUI. You can edit the HTML code directly so if you know how to code HTML modifications are easy.

The plain text version is either made automatically from the HTML version or you can make your own version that fits your needs.

Personalization is supported as you can use any field that you have in the database.

The bandwidth requirements are the highest of them all as each mail is sent on its own - leaving no room for good network performance.

This mailer has some unique features that still makes it interesting. It can handle bounced messages and automatically exclude that e-mail from receiving any further emails. It can also read a POP3 account and handle e-mail based subscriptions. This makes the recipient life cycle management easy.