Mass Mailing Software - Recommendations?
I'm looking for an application to send out occasional mail in bulk (a few hundred at a time, at most) to our own customers as our current software MachMailer5 is no longer supported, which is a shame as it does everything we need (and probably quite a bit more). Searches on the internet have not found anything that seems to do what that software did written in the last decade or so, I guess things have moved on quite a bit since we bought it and we're only in this mess as we need to install something on Win7 and have no access to the original files (assuming they would work), nor to the activation server for the licence.
For reasons too tedious (and frustrating) to go into we cannot use MailMerge in our Exchange server and I am really reluctant to go with third party mailing services for reputational reasons, cost, control, and also as we like our customers to see mail coming genuinely from the IP address of our server so that we don't fall foul of (otherwise understandable) filters not liking the results of any reverse look-up.
I would prefer something with the option of using its own SMTP(?) engine as well as connecting to our server if required. We need something that can be used about once a month, and allow a user to send an email as if it came from another user within the company, for example her (or his) bosses, with replies, read-receipts etc also going back to that address. This is to fulfil the PA role rather than to stitch someone up. We use non-delivery receipts only to remove address that have clearly died, and like read-receipts but have no problem with most people setting their email clients into stealth mode for privacy reasons, but don't need to do any more sophisticated tracking than that, no hidden pixels etc
It needs to be able to handle simple personalisation (Dear Joe, Dear Mr. Smith etc) from an excel spreadsheet (or similar) with that information and the addresses in, be able to attach a couple of documents if required and if it could have the odd graphic (logo etc) embedded in each message when appropriate rather than just a hyperlink, that would be fantastic but its not something we've really missed to date.
We handle any unsubscribe requests manually (just deleting them from the spreadsheet on request), but have no objection to any automatic facility to comply with differing legal jurisdictions if necessary.
Is this kind of stuff written/sold anymore or am I living too much in the late 1990's?
Any reviews (good or bad) from users to help me make any selection would also be appreciated, but as you can see our needs are fairly simple.
Thanks
M7S