If you’re a small to medium-sized business, it behooves you to keep in touch with your customers and potential customers. An e-mail marketing application like OpenEMM can help by letting you send out any kind of e-mailings, including newsletters and service messages (transaction messages and event- or time-triggered messages). OpenEMM offers targeting, bounce management, link tracking, realtime statistics, a content management extension, and a scripting feature.
German developer Martin Aschoff, who maintains OpenEMM, say the project was designed in 2005 as a single-server version of his company’s E-Marketing Manager software. “Since we focused on big companies at that time we decided to make OpenEMM open source to quickly find international users (who might later buy commercial services from us) and to get input for development from all over the world. We launched OpenEMM on SourceForge.net in July 2006. The fast adoption of OpenEMM in more than 80 countries worldwide validated this decision.”
Aschoff says that compared to alternatives such as phplist and Dada Mail, OpenEMM is stronger in usability (GUI, graphical realtime statistics, online update) and number of features. However, unlike those alternatives, “OpenEMM is not a simple script but needs Java and a servlet engine (which is embedded in OpenEMM) to run. OpenEMM is written mainly in Java (we use Eclipse for development) and is based on the Java frameworks Spring, Struts, and Hibernate for maximum stability and scalability.” That robust foundation allows even large companies to take advantage of OpenEMM. “The biggest user we know of has a mailing list of 3.5 million names and sends out about 20 million messages a month,” Aschoff says.
Aschoff advises new users read the comprehensive 272-page user manual. The project also offers an install guide that should help users improve OpenEMM performance, and support forums with a wealth of hints and tricks from the community, including ready-to-use scripts to extend the software’s functionality.
The project is still growing and improving. The next version is scheduled for late summer with a lot of new features, and replaces the internal servlet engine Resin with Tomcat, at the request of third-party developers. Aschoff says the project usually makes two major releases per year, with some smaller bug-fix releases in between. He also welcomes contributors. “We now have contributors from all continents except for Australia (wink!).”