A short evaluation of open source Newsletter/Mailinglist Software
A friend of mine asked me which newsletter system to use for sending abt 2k emails abt once a week. I couldn’t immediately respond, so I gave it a small evaluation of current products. As prerequisite, the system should be in active development, run on a (web)server, easy to use (usability over features) and it would be nice to use it at lowcost or for free. This limited the selection a lot and I just want to present my final opinion:
My favorite and ‘winner’ is the NotOneBit.com Simple Mailing List. It’s written in PHP, simple, clean and really easy to use. Perfect for a small use-case like this. Check it out: http://www.notonebit.com/projects/mailinglist/
Actually I thought PHPlist is first choice, but I didn’t liked it usability at all – I wonder why it’s so popular?
OpenEMM has a nice website and pretends to be opensource, but somehow I wasn’t able to get a proper version to run and test. Looks more like fake to me… Update: see comments, apparently there’s lot’s of work going on and you can download it from sourceforge easily..
MailMan is quite popular, known as stable and high performant, but still I don’t like the backend. The whole software looks a bit outdated to me… c’mon it’s 2009!!!
Other systems may worth a look as not for free, so I didn’t test them:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/
Nice sources to check:
http://www.inmedias.de/download/Newsletter-Software.pdf
I was wondering what was so difficult to download OpenEMM from sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openemm/files/) and install it on a web server?
I did that a while ago and it was fairly easy to install. I wonder if this has changed in the last half year, because that is when I did install it on my local webserver to check it out (haven’t sent mail with it).
hm alright, I’ve just checked, looks better now, I may give it a try again..