Bulk HTML Emailer for Mac
March 31, 2010 7:00 AM   Subscribe

What's a good bulk emailer for Mac?

I need to send out a bulk email for work, and it seems like it might become a more regular part of my job, so I'm looking for a software solution instead of breaking the recipient list into Mail.app-manageable chunks. What's a good bulk mailer for Mac? I need it to do HTML messages, and I'm hoping for an in-app address book that doesn't mess with my actual address book and a decent GUI, because I'm not the most "beta" of users.

For what it's worth, the people I'm sending to are expecting the messages, so it's not SPAM.
posted by moviehawk to Computers & Internet (8 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
You'll probably want to use something like an announcement-only Mailman, which is software designed for this sort of thing. Makes sign up and removal very easy for both you and the recips.
posted by unixrat at 7:10 AM on March 31, 2010


Best answer: I've used MacMassMailer, and liked it. I eventually switched to a hosted solution, because I purchase "home" service from my ISP, and feared getting shut down or blacklisted. It also takes a fair amount of time to send it yourself. I don't remember exactly how long it took, but a few hours for a list of 500 at least.

Otherwise, it does decent list management and can work with any database files or address book files. Supports HTML templates, and has a nice interface. It'll also do variable fields, so you can send emails with the subject line "Hello John Doe!" to Mr. John Doe.
posted by fontophilic at 7:39 AM on March 31, 2010


Just echoing unixrat & b1tr0t. Depending on the volume of mail you expect to send, and the skills & resources available to you. From your post I'd be more inclined to suggest a specialist provider. I'm just about to migrate a list to MailChimp, but there are plenty of others.
posted by dirm at 9:13 AM on March 31, 2010


Response by poster: Good luck when your ISP shuts you down.

I'm not doing this from home; I'm doing it from work, where we don't have any problem sending this kind of message. A colleague of mine in a different department uses a Windows-only program to send messages to a database much larger than what I'm going to send to. MacMassMailer sounds what I'm looking for.
posted by moviehawk at 9:42 AM on March 31, 2010


I strongly advise against using a perconal computer software. Instead use any of the availabe email marketing solutions that live on the web. One possibility is campaign monitor which is good enough for many uses and cheap. Of course there are alternatives.
posted by oxit at 10:43 AM on March 31, 2010


How many are we talking? If it's more than 500, it's very reasonable to use a web service. We used Campaign Monitor to send around 50,000 a month. Mail Chimp looked great, but the price wasn't competitive at our volume.
posted by GilloD at 9:00 PM on March 31, 2010


I use MailChimp and love it, but before I migrated my lists to an online provider, I used Direct Mail, which worked really well, too. If you're set on using a desktop application, Direct Mail is definitely worth a look.
posted by lewistate at 5:46 AM on April 1, 2010


Response by poster: As it turns out, I latched onto eTargeter though our IT office, and now there's some push for an SRM that includes some mailing components, so no desktop app was required.
posted by moviehawk at 10:12 AM on May 20, 2010


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