[NBLUG/talk] Looking for software...

[troy]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 11:42:39AM -0700, Christopher Wagner wrote:
> Ok folks..  This one has had me stumped for quite awhile and I haven't
> found an adequate solution.  What I'm trying to do isn't all that
> complicated:
> 
> First, to make this clear, we have a list of people who have explicitly
> expressed interest in receiving information about the products my
> company has to offer.  Hence, this is *NOT* for sending UCE.  I just
> want to make sure no one thinks I'm spamming. :)
> 
> What we're trying to do is to send a single email out to a couple
> hundred customers on our mailing list.  We are looking for an email
> program that will provide us with the ability to put a variable in the
> message for something like the customers first name.  We want to be able
> to personalize it for the customer.  In additon, it might be nice to
> have the program do some sanity checks on the email message being
> released, ie: check the email for any Rich Text or HTML flaws, make sure
> there's a plain text portion, and possibly run it through spamassassin
> first before letting it be sent.  I'd like to make this as easy for our
> customers to receive and view as possible, while still managing to
> satisfy my marketing manager.

I wrote a simple mailmerge program in perl once (to sell mortgages and
pharmaceutical products, of course)  It really wasn't that hard.  Either
loop over a flat file or database query, placing the fields into
variables.  Interpolate those variables into a message template, inject
the message into the outgoing spool and sit back and wait for the
complaints to come in.

There are plenty of nice perl modules for creating MIME e-mails:
perldoc MIME::Tools for a massive overview
perldoc MIME::Lite which is probably all you'd need.

Using the above, it's only slightly more than trivial to create even
very complicated multipart messages containing embedded images etc.

There are simple PEAR modules for generating valid emails as well.
If your marketing people prefer a GUI, I'd just make it web-based.

-troy