First of all, I'm not a huge fan of mass emailings. Whenever possible, it's best to limit email to those who might actually be interested in your message, that is, less is better. For example, only sending email to people who have added certain items to their cart but didn't purchase. This way, you cut down on your complaints and annoy fewer people (who probably have no interest in 90% of your emails) while still delivering your message to the 10% of people who actually are interested.
Of course, building this type of list frequently involves a great amount of data munging, every business has such data stored in different ways. Some people are operating shopping carts while some operate download sites or membership sites.
It seems every tool tries to do everything, if you've got one of those
whiz-bang shopping carts, you probably have a fairly crummy newsletter manager
- one that doesn't inter-operate with your sales lead collection software, won't
send in the background and doesn't know how to do parallel sends. Maybe you
want to email coupon codes, but your sales lead collector software doesn't
handle that - what's worse, all of them want to handle opt-outs!
This is where PluckMail fits in You see, pluckmail does not know or care where you get your mailing list from. By remaining agnostic, it can operate with any other tool capable of producing a list of email addresses, names, etc.. furthermore, it has a mail merge feature, allowing you to send custom information (such as coupon codes, customer names or coded URL's) from within this list.
PluckMail provides opt-out capabilities, including the now standard "List-Unsubscribe:" header.
Many people turn HTML off, (and some of us prefer to use text-only email programs) if you want to reach them, you should send plain-text emails. But what of those who do have HTML turned on? well, you can send html as well. PluckMail allows both at the same time via the MIME specification.
(By the way, did you know some spam tools rate HTML-only messages with a higher spam score?)
Don't worry, it does have a complete web based control panel, but as you use it (especially if
you wire it in to your other software) you will appreciate the command line interface. By having a
command line, it is able to inter-operate with the shell. To make it easier, the web interface
shows you how to do the same thing via the command line tools.
Some popular email clients recognize a "List-Unsubscribe:" header, including it will greatly reduce your spam complaints because it is easier for people to opt-out. PluckMail offers the "mailremove.pl" utility for working with these, you simply drop it in as a sendmail alias (with the local part prefix) and it automatically adds email addresses to an opt-out list, where they will not receive future emails.
By the way, this also works with the "Errors-To" header (to remove bounces)
PluckMail relies on the Berkley DBM library (most ISP's have this, it's fairly common among perl installations) this eliminates the need for tweaking mysql settings.
You are not logged in, you must login before you can use the demo. (don't worry, creating an account is free)
NOTE you must be logged in to access the demo. We don't want spam-bots harvesting email addresses.
Please! this tool is not to be used for anything other than legitimate email campaigns, this means that people must have agreed to receive emails before you send them.
PluckMail is free with a text link, however we understand this may not be suitable for everyone. Therefore, we also offer a licensed version that does not have this restriction.