Posted on Wednesday 10th of October 2007 at 09:31 in Reviews

Review: Atomic Mail Sender - email marketing application

Here is the first user to benefit from the free review worth $100 (there are still two spots left so if you want one, hurry up!). This first review covers an all too familiar topic for me: Email marketing applications.

Because this review was handled through the text-link offer, this is a sponsored post.

The specific product in focus is the Atomic Bulk Email Sender from massmailsoftware.com.

What is it?
Well, it's quite clear from the title that it's an email marketing application and the description offered on the site promises all you need: "Atomic Bulk Mail Sender (AMS) is a program with built-in tracking facilities to design, send and monitor bulk personalized messages."

AMS focuses heavily on tracking, which is good
All too often you see excellent applications which are let down by a lack of detailed tracking/statistics. AMS 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".

It's actually not a web-solution, it's a downloadable app
This has actually started alarm bells ringing in my head. Mass-mail applications that run from your personal line have an increased chance of getting your connection refused by your ISP. In a constant fight against spam; ISPs need to remain ontop of this sort of behaviour.



Let me explain. When you're running an email marketing campaign it's possible that recipients will mark the email as spam (especially if they didn't specifically opt-in to it). If a certain number of users flag your email as spam, the domain from which it was sent becomes blacklisted - which is not good. So I'd highly recommend only using an application like this for campaigns where the users have actually stated that they wish to receive it.

Download the trial for free
Basically the application costs $79.85 but you can get a limited functionality trial for free (download it here). The download is only 5.3mb so it shouldn't take long on a broadband connection.

Hook into an SMTP server of your choice
Upon installing the application you are invited to enter a series of SMTP servers to broadcast email over - which seems slightly confusing considering the information for the product stated it had a "built in SMTP server". This is quite frustrating because you need to have login credentials to an SMTP server (be that Yahoo or MSN - although I couldn't get either to accept my connection). Which isn't ideal, although I'm sure you could get a server to accept your connection - I just don't have the time. I'm under no illusion that AMS will actually send emails because it's not hard.



The problems of the trial version
Quite clearly a trial version is a good idea; allowing people to try the product before they buy it - but this one is astonishingly limited for what it is. You can't broadcast to more than 50 people - that I'm fine with. But you can't actually save your emails either, which is a bit confusing. Moreso, this isn't mentioned to you before attempting it - meaning you could spend hours doing horrific inline HTML in the basic text editor provided, only to find your efforts are wasted as you're unable to save.

I've encountered applications before that wouldn't let you save in the trial - and that annoys me so much I'm unable to consider using it. I know many of my peers feel the same way - so it's not a good place to impose restrictions because it'll just upset users.

Some good points, excellent cross-selling of products
There's a web-app that supports AMS that allows you to track the emails you send out and that's heavily rolled into this app. If you don't have a mailing list already you are offered the opporuntity to buy another product that spiders them for you. They do mange to upsell the other products quite nicely, but while toying with it I can't help but wonder why this approach was taken.

Fierce competition, with online apps
Unfortunately for AMS I'm overly familiar with Interspire's SendStudio which is an excellent application that manages to do everything we see here. SendStudio is a PHP/MySQL solution ($279) that manages everything: it has excellent mailing list management, autoresponders, full tracking and statistics, bounced email support, subscriptions/unsubscriptions and multipart email broadcasting.

So with SendStudio for $279 you get the full package with free installation, 12 months support, 12 months of free product updates (should they release new versions), free 12 months hosting and 30 days money back guarantee.

With AMS you pay $79.85 for the application (including lifetime technical support and one-year free upgrades). However to get the autoresponder functionality you need to buy Atomic Email Autoresponder for a further $48.95. There are bundle deals available here but it still seems awfully expensive for a desktop-based solution that (forgive me if I'm incorrect, but I do believe you can get blacklisted for sending out "spammy" emails.

The other products are a tad suspicious
The massreach pack caught my eye as something that could easily be used for malicious purposes - infact I find myself struggling to think of innocent uses. For a discounted price of $242.78 you get $346.90's worth of applications:

# The Atomic Email Hunter - this extracts email addresses from websites.
# Atomic Email Logger with 4 plug-ins - a program that extracts emails from hard drives, CD's, DVD's and the local area network.
# Atomic Newsgroup Explorer - extracts (you guessed it) emails from newsgroups.
# Atomic CD Email Extractor - extracts emails from CD's and DVD's (yeah, the Atomic Email Logger does that too apparently, so now you have two products to do the same task).
# Atomic WhoIS Explorer - that's right, get the email addresses listed in the WhoIS record for various domains.
# Atomic IE Contacts Spy - extracts emails from each website you visit (I guess).

Is there a single harmless use for the above applications? What that looks like to me (as a web-savvy user) is a "spam kit for beginners". If you blindly collect email addresses in this way and try to broadcast to them, you're going to get flagged as spam and you'll get blacklisted. If you don't on the first send, you probably will on the second. Users are too wise to blind prospective emails these days. If they're not expecting items from you they won't open it - and they are likely to flag it as spam (if you're not already flagged as spam in the first place).

Conclusion
I think I've seen enough. The application on offer (Atomic Mail Sender) is alright, but entirely outclassed by web-based solutions such as SendStudio. I don't see a reason why there would be demand for standalone products like this when the tracking package is a web-app anyway - they might as well roll both into one like everyone else is doing. I always feel bad when my honest opinion in a sponsored post is negative but I just can't see the practical application for this over web-apps. Tie that in with the unusually "spammy" tools also on offer and I find the company lacks credability.

Before I receive any backlash - sponsored posts don't have to be positive, you're paying for my professional opinion on something and that's exactly what I give. If I like the product then I absolutely state that, if I don't like it I try to be as constructive as possible in my criticism. You pay for my opinion, you don't get to put words in my mouth (as previous reviewees have thought).

 

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