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/mailing-list/

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 The whole software looks a bit outdated to me… c’mon it’s 2009!!!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.mailingwork.de/

http://www.supermailer.de/

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/

Nice sources to check:

http://www.inmedias.de/download/Newsletter-Software.pdf

http://www.vwsoft.de/?sectionid=pgminfo&pgmid=3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_marketing_software

I did a short eval of projects dealing with re currency in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Here a short list & rough of interesting projects dealing with repeating time (intervals):

Common used lilbrary: http://runt.rubyforge.org
A better runt(?): http://github.com/nickstenning/recurring_event
Date extension, yahoo dev, rspec like: http://github.com/jhubert/ruby-date-recur

http://recurring.rubyforge.org

http://github.com/EdvardM/recurrence

http://github.com/fnando/recurrence

Check this as well:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/85699/whats-the-best-way-to-model-recurring-events-in-a-calendar-application

Comatose (29. June 2007)
Comatose is a micro CMS designed for being embedded into existing Rails applications

http://railsbased.org/projects/8-Comatose.html

Geego
Geego is for developers and designers that want to provide fully updatable websites for their clients.

http://www.geegocms.com/

Mephisto (27. July 2006)
Complete Blog System, Mephisto is a publishing system that makes it super easy to setup a blog or website.

http://mephistoblog.com/

Typo
Complete Blog System, Similar to Mephisto

http://wiki.github.com/fdv/typo/

Radiant CMS
Radiant is a no-fluff, open source content management system designed for small teams.
Looks cool but no direkt RoR integration?

http://radiantcms.org/

Railfrog (3. July 2007)
Railfrog is a user-friendly, open-source website deployment and content management system built with Ruby on Rails.
dead project?!

http://railfrog.com/

Rubricks (31. July 2007)
Rubricks is a component based open source CMS powered by Ruby on Rails.

http://rubricks.org/

Seymore (04/02/2007)
Seymore is an open source content management system which integrates directly into pages.

http://www.slicedsoftware.com/software/seymore/

SimpleCMS, (29. December 2007),
small simple, inline edit. Simple CMS is a very easy to use and pretty advanced CMS plugin.

http://pullmonkey.com/2007/12/30/simple-cms-plugin-for-rails-demo

CMSPlugin
CMSplugin provides your Rails application with a “CMS framework”. That means authentication, authorization, roles, permissions, categories, tags, etc… but from a very flexible scope.

http://cmsplugin.rubyforge.org

open rcms (25.6.2007)

http://rcms.oopen.de/Home/

Roxanne
An in-place editor for your entire website. Roxanne is a simple Site-Management Tool to quickly manage your content. See first steps to get the idea behind Roxanne.

http://www.m42.ch/projects/roxanne/information.php

Substruct
The first and most robust Ruby on Rails open source e-commerce project.

http://code.google.com/p/substruct/

Goldberg (promising)

http://www.goldberg.240gl.org