A question I’m asked often is “can I get into email marketing with only open source software?” The answer is yes, but there’s a reason the big guys get away with charging thousands of dollars for mailing and CRM platforms. On a small scale, it’s very possible, provided you understand the difficulties you’ll face taking a DIY approach with free software.

The biggest and most sophisticated option is OpenEMM, and takes the number one spot in the pantheon of open source mailing software. It’s actually the open-source but not particularly crippled variant of a commercial product from Agnitas AG. It has good support for list management functions, supports a certain level of automation, and allows event and date-driven mailing. It offers real-time statistics, tracking clicks, opens, unsubscribes, bounces. In terms of its interface and capabilities, it compares favoribly to the multi-thousand dollar alternatives.

Where does it fall apart? Installation is absolutely miserable. I couldn’t complete it on a fresh Centos install, and I’m reasonably competent at what I do. I ended up opting for the VMWare image, which doesn’t require messing around with stuff to get all the bells and whistles to work. Maybe if it was simpler to install, I’d feel more charitable toward it, but I’d rather live without the bells and whistles to have something more plug-and-play. It’s also not fast, but clocking it running bridged under VMWare isn’t a fair test.

A tie for first goes to PHPList. This is a venerable package, and while PHP running on a web server isn’t the best application platform for a mailing system, it performs reasonably well, all things considered. It’s not as feature-complete as it could be, and a few things vital to the email marketer, like click tracking, are “experimental.” The database design doesn’t scale at all. On my testbed system, a P4 with 2 gigs of RAM, 10k subscribers with 8 fields per started getting sluggish, and with 50k the system wouldn’t function at all. More’s the pity, too, as Swiftmail and qmail were good to about 30k per hour, absolutely staggering for a simple, open source mailer injecting a general-purpose MTA.

I was actually able to kludge around the lack of tracking pretty effectively with a little bit of additional code. I tested it too with email-only, and got the thing to process a 100k list, but it was tedious. 50k’s probably a reasonable limit for a similar system, which in most cases is a respectable size. If you can get the server and the bandwidth at the right price, shunting your old  and unreponsive subscribers to a PHPList system and banging out a creative or newsletter once in a while could keep costs (and list management hassle) down with services like Aweber.

The dark-horse second place winner? Mailpress. This thing, particularly if you’re in the blog game, is an absolute sleeper. It’s well designed, easy to use, and has a plugin metaphor that allows you to add functionality without compromising the core functionality. The plugins available are extensive, click tracking, open tracking, GeoIP functionality (most of the “big mailers” don’t have!) and a host of nice list management and Wordpress integration features can be enabled.

Why didn’t it take first? It’s slow. I can’t account for why it didn’t want to break 1000 per hour even into a dummy MTA, but it didn’t. I suspect it’s related to my other 3 objections - it’s busy, it’s a little too clever, and it is, after all is said and done, just a Wordpress plugin. There’s some hairy code in PHPList, but it doesn’t have to deal in hooks, actions, and other Wordpress-isms. It’s busy, you have to light up a lot of Mailpress plugins to get information valuable for email marketing. And, frankly, it’s maybe a little too clever. There’s other Wordpress blast-o-matic plugins that I’m sure just dump php mail()’s as fast as they can into the MTA, and that probably suffices for most people, and is probably about all should really be expected of Wordpress.

Tie for third? Pommo and DadaMail. Pommo is like PHPList’s kinder, gentler, easier, and much slower and less capable sibling. It’s easy, and it’s often in Fantastico control panels particularly if PHPList isn’t, so maybe for a small list where you’re not terribly concerned with monitoring opens and clicks, it’s fine. DadaMail is interesting, and has some fairly advanced features, but it’s written in Perl. I’ve had enough of Perl, so gave it a once-over but I don’t think anything written in Perl is worth putting up with Perl.

Last place? Everything else. There’s your Majordomo’s and ezmlm’s and so on, which aren’t suited to email marketing at all. Same with GNU Mailman, and everything of that ilk that’s more designed for public or at least moderated email discussion lists. There’s a few other options, but based on the minimal activity and sparse feature lists associated with most of them, they didn’t seem worth evaluating.

What’s the bottom line? If you want an open-source alternative to the expensive mailing platforms that’s as close as you can get to a full-featured mailing/CRM system, OpenEMM is the only game in town. Be prepared for the installation and administration that comes with it, and don’t expect millions per hour with it, at least with a general-purpose MTA. If you want to blast on a budget on a reasonably large scale, PHPList is your huckleberry. If you’re not compulsive about tracking, or need a pleasant user experience, Pommo delivers - just not very fast, and you won’t be able to monitor clicks and opens.

If you want no-brainer easy, and are already running Wordpress, check out Mailpress. It doesn’t scale, but it’s smart, it’s slick, and it’s hard not to like it.