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.

Atomic email studio review

Is it Really a Perfect Mass Email Solution?

Website: http://www.massemailsoft.com

Price: varies, click here for current price

Support: email, phone, chat

Video Presentation: Running time: 06:05. Click here to watch.

What is Atomic Email Studio?

Atomic Email Studio is an all-in-one solution for Internet marketing. From one place you can control all your email campaigns, create and send newsletters, manage mailing lists, find new prospects. Also, you have a convenient access to the statistics provided by their on-line services (newsletter tracking, survey generator etc).

Atomic Email Studio is a 9-in-1 software package and here’s the main modules:

Mailer: create and send newsletters (editable HTML templates included);

Autoresponder: send replies to the incoming mail automatically;

List Manager: edit mailing lists on your PC (your lists are secure and not uploaded to any on-line service);

Subscription Manager: process users adding / removal requests automatically;

Extractor: find new target prospects for your business;

Verifier: validate e-mail addresses.

Installation

Atomic Email Studio is very easy to install. System requirements are very basic, works on any Windows computer.

Adding Emails into the Application

The software offers a lot of ways to add email addresses:

1. From text files - *.txt, *.csv, *.lst, *.html and others
2. From email clients (Outlook, Windows Mail, Eudora, IncrediMail and The Bat ), compressed PST files, archives (ZIP, RAR and ACE)
3. From the Web (websites, newsgroups, WHOIS, cached Internet browser files)

As you will see Atomic Email Studio makes adding emails into the application very easy, all popular data storage formats are supported.

Working with the list of emails

List Manager is used to delete duplicates and spam traps, fix common typos, split and merge lists and other operations.

Email Verification

When your mailing list is not up-to-date or of poor quality you are likely to have issues with your ISP. Here’s a likely scenario: you send mass emails and get lots of bounces, your ISP notes lots of email coming to their server, thinks it is getting spammed and starts to investigate the reasons of this surge in email traffic. You can avoid this type of problem when you verify the email addresses in your list. The application lets you verify the syntax and check if the mailbox exists. This is a must-do process for any list you have not used for a while and Atomic Email Studio has this function out of the box.

Mass Emailing

First I want to say that Atomic Email Studio is fully CAN-SPAM compliant. When you use HTML you can add an unsubscribe link to your email and the user will be unsubscribed from your list. If you prefer plain text messages you should add instructions at the bottom saying to click the reply button and type UNSUBSCRIBE into the subject field. Atomic Email Studio checks your POP3/IMAP server and when this email is received it unsubscribes the user from the mailing list. That said, Atomic Email Studio puts you in control over your actions and does let you use proxies, custom headers, rotating SMTP servers, etc. The program has everything you may need to send mass emails, I especially like the way they implemented HTML support – it’s not just regular HTML templates, you can edit every bit of code to make your letter look exactly like you want it.

Tracking open and click-through rates

Atomic Email Studio is not just about sending emails, it lets you track how many emails are opened, what links are clicked, compare email campaigns and much more.

Ease of Use

The software is very intuitive, when you open it you see a dozen of buttons but only "New Project" and "Open Project" are active. After creating a new project you see a very user-friendly wizard that walks you through the whole process from importing addresses to sending emails and comparing results of your campaigns. But a good video is worth a thousand words, сlick here to view the video presentation. It’s a short (6 minutes) no-nonsense video, I highly recommend to watch it in order to get a good idea of how the application works.

Advantages

It is a desktop software, not a subscription-based online service, so users don't have to recurringly pay high prices for every single message they send out; their activities remain private and safe - they are not giving away their valuable data to any third party.

Summary:

Atomic Email Studio is a good investment. This feature-packed application will help you put together and mail an unlimited number of promotional emails, newsletters or regular text emails to an unlimited number of recipients.

Email Harvesting - Is it right or wrong?

Email harvesting is right if it is done in the right context. For example, if you have a product that you think another business would be intrested in, the only options you have to contact them normally is:

• Telephone them
• Post them a flyer
• Do a cold visit at their premisis

All the above options are about cold calling a business about your product services, which most businesses except and expect. In this context, if that business has a website and an email address, there is no harm in emailing that business about your products and services. In this context, it is just the same as sending them a flyer in the post or cold calling them.

There are ways of sending an email to a harvested list of emails. You must make it clear:

• How you find thier email address.
• How to opt in to your newsletter, if they want to receive further information from you.
• How to opt out and never receive anymore communication from you.
• To give your own business contact details, so that they can contact you to stop receiving emails from your business

Email Harvesting is wrong and can be categorised as spamming if you purchase an email list very cheaply and you don't know how that list has been generated, or the email list provider can not provide the opt in details of the email addresses. If you go down this avenue, your online business could suffer and get a reputation of being a spammer. If this happens, you could lose the following:

• Your ISP.
• Your Domain host.
• Your Domain.
• Your name will be added to the spam list.
• Your business will be blacklisted.
• You will gain a very bad reputation as a spammer.

If this happens, any online business that you try to start up will always have an reputation of being a spammer

In conclusion, Email harvesting is right if it is done:

• In context and only done to business to business
• You have harvested the email addresses yourself and you know which websites they have come from.
• You make that clear in your opening email about how you found their email address.

Email harvesting is wrong if you have purchased a list of emails blindly and you don't know the origins of how those emails were generated or found. As it has been made aware in this, blog the consequences of being classed as a spammer can bring your online business to an abrupt end.