To get started with sending emails through OpenEMM, you first must create a “mailing”, which can either be a part of a campaign, or by itself (a cool feature when testing this software).  After you complete a short wizard, you can fine tune the mailing very easily:

Creating a mailing in OpenEMM

Once you get the Mailing setup in OpenEMM, you can then add email addresses, or recipients, into OpenEMM (maybe it’s best to add those first, but it’s more fun to create the mailing first- it doesn’t really matter which order you do them in). One really nice feature, as you can see, is that it’s short and to the point- if you just want to add email addresses and get on with your life, OpenEMM does a very nice job of that!

Adding an email address in OpenEMM

Moving on, we also have the ability to create a template in OpenEMM to use for our mailings.  This is nice, since the templates look professional, clean, and can be configured using variables for database variables (such as first and last names).  I hate the impersonal feeling of mass mailing, and the inclusion of this feature is nice.

OpenEMM email template

Speaking of editing templates, OpenEMM allows you to preview how your template will look at different resolutions.  This feature is really nice, since I use static table sizes in my designs, and I’m always curious as to how the border regions of tables look at higher/lower resolutions.

Template preview feature in OpenEMM

Now that I’ve talked up OpenEMM enough to sound like a commissioned salesman, let’s talk about some of the disadvantages:

• OpenEMM doesn’t appear to support an external mail server- you can either use the mail server built into the server that OpenEMM is installed on, or you can use the bundled mail server.
• OpenEMM’s mail server doesn’t always work 100% out of the box.  If you want to switch mail servers, there isn’t a graphical way to do this.  It would really be nice to have an “email server configuration” page built into OpenEMM. That way, I could use a mail server that is located on another server.
• OpenEMM requires the installation of Java from Sun, and also a user account created.  OpenEMM isn’t the easiest mass email marketing software to install.

However, none of these disadvantages are particularly crippling. Time wise, I would say that it took me about an hour or so to install. Although I’m just playing with mass email marketing software at the moment, if I ever do decide to take the plunge and get started, OpenEMM will definitely be the software that I will use.