Review: Atomic Mail Sender

Today I want to review a newsletter email marketing application - Atomic Mail Sender from http://www.massmailsoftware.com. Is it worth buying or even downloading a free trial?

What is it?

It is quite clear from the title that this in an email marketing application and the description on the website says "Atomic Mail Sender (AMS) is a program with built-in tracking facilities to design, send and monitor bulk personalized messages".

What is it for?

The email marketing application is ideal for newsletters, targeted email marketing and keeping in touch with customers.

Downloadable application, not a web service

This is an important thing and it has both advantages and disadvantages. Let me explain. Mass mail applications send mail through your personal SMTP server (hosted on your website), your ISP's SMTP server or a third-party SMTP. When a certain number of users mark emails from you as spam your server becomes blacklisted, which is not good and usually means you can no longer use the server. So I would highly recommend only using an application like this for campaigns where the users have actually stated that they wish to receive emails from you.

Ready to Google for a web-based email marketing service? Wait just yet... Before you can start using a web service you will have to ask for permission from the people in your mailing list to send emails to them. Basically you need to send a short note asking them to click the subscribe link if they want to receive newsletters from you. How many of them will click the link? Almost none!

So a stand-alone app is the way to go if you do not want to lose a part of your subscribers because of the double-optin procedure imposed by web services.

Focus on tracking

All too often one sees good mass email solutions that offer no or little tracking functionality. Atomic Mail Sender promises that the level of tracking available allows you "compare the effectiveness of your email campaigns by monitoring who, from what country and when opens your email, clicks links or loads images".

Download free trial

Basically the application costs $79.85 but you can get a limited functionality trial for free (download it here).

Tweak the settings

The email marketing application has a built-in SMTP server but if you use it most of your emails will be filtered as spam and nobody will even see them. So you need to use an external SMTP. I use Gmail so I entered Gmail's SMTP credentials and sent a test email without any problem. I used the settings shown below.

The good thing is that you can rotate SMTP servers so you can send more emails if you have several accounts.

Getting used to user interface

This software is novice-friendly with large icons that resemble the functions that they perform.

Start creating an email by selecting the new email icon at the top of the screen. Then you are able to add images, hyperlinks, lines and tables. This product has all the basic editing features to create an attractive and functional email.

List management

You always should give users an easy way to unsubscribe from your mailings and this email sender has this function. When you are sending a letter using an HTML template the unsubscribe links is there on top of the page and if you prefer text format you can instruct recipients to reply to your email with "unsubscribe", "remove" or any other word in the subject line.

Conclusion

The basic purpose of a mass emailer is mailing, and this is what is well developed in Atomic Mail Sender. It gets the messages out fast using a multi-threaded internal SMTP engine or multiple third-party SMTP servers.

Another strong part of the application is the message editor, which offers solid HTML editing support and useful newsletter templates.

The weak side of Atomic Mail Sender is that its list management functions are limited to unsubscribing users. But these functions can be found in Atomic List Manager which integrates with the mail sender. Further integration with Atomic Mail Tracker brings tracking options to Atomic Mail Sender. You can analyze how your messages are opened, and whether people click.

I think Atomic Mail Sender is a good buy, you get an efficient and easy-to-use application for a reasonable price, but if you need more functions you probably better check out their all-in-one application, Email Studio.