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[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 06:00:32PM -0400, David Minton wrote:
> Did everyone miss this the first time, or am I just not cool enough :-(

Hi, David -

I guess people were too distracted by the libertarian ice-skating
global warming polar bears, and the sharks with frickin laser beams.

I saw it, but I'm not familiar with a package for sale that does all
of what you need; it generally falls to the for-pay ESP companies to
handle all of that for you. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find a
ESP that isn't tainted to smaller or larger degree by lousy list
management, sleazy tactics, pure spam-for-hire mentalities, and the
like. Or, if you can find one, they tend to be so expensive that they
focus on a few select clients (e.g, Quris and Charles Schwab) to the
exclusion of most new client acquisition. 

I've got some contacts who may be able to advise you on choosing an ESP
worth paying, but I don't think you're going to find a package off the
shelf that handles this sort of campaign-based tracking and so forth,
because there's little incentive to develop it given the high reputation
costs of failure, combined with the high costs of development in the
first place, which drive a vicious circle that turns every campaign
manager software development effort into an ESP to pay for the costs,
etc. ad infinitum. Or, alternately, depending on how you look at it, the
folks who get into that sort of business are banking on the va$t profit$
to be made off the need, and aren't likely to do a product when they can
provide a service and charge for each mailing. And those are the ones
to look out for, because they tend not to care much about abuse issues
and so they get widely blocked very rapidly.

There are some local companies that do this sort of campaign management
as well - I've had run-ins with most of them for slack list management
(e.g., bronto for letting some idjit spam me with a golf newsletter;
sourcekit for recruiter mailings, and so on). It's in the nature of
the business that you have to trust your customers' lists, but it all
comes down to how much you can avoid pissing off both the customer and
the folks who complain when they enable spamming through their service.
And keeping costs down at the same time.

Finally, you can try searching for "email campaign manager software";
I found a couple of listings that might be worth looking at, and a
whole slew of ASPs/ESPs.

That all said, we use Mailman for our newsletter and for most of our
internal lists, as well as for all the Web Standards Project lists we
host, and the Webdesign-L list. I still use majordomo for some stuff,
but mostly only if they're small lists and I expect the participants
to be relatively savvy. I know that doesn't help you with your need
for HTML email and tracking and all that jazz, but Mailman does allow
for user management, even if it's ugly and stupid.

Good luck.
Steve

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