poMMo - painless mass mailing

Once every two or three months I need to send a newsletter to 4000+ subscribers. If you ever tried mass mailing, you probably know that Thunderbird is not exactly the tool to do it.

During last year I tested perhaps half a dozen different solutions both commercial and open-source/freeware. In my case additional requirement is to be able to send the message as properly UTF-8 encoded HTML, which many of these tools failed to fulfil.

And just today I literally stumbled upon an GPLicensed PHP/MySQL script called poMMo. It does just about everything I want it to do. I can import my address list, create the content using WYSIWYG editor, do a test run and finally send the newsletter to all subscribers.

The installation is very easy (I'm not even sure if there is an installation instruction as I didn't need one), just upload the files to server, modify template config file and create a MySQL database. Then just follow on-screen instructions.

Apart from sending simple generic newsletters like mine, poMMo offers some more advanced features as well such as personalised content (greet each subscriber with their own name!) or sending throttle (so that your hosting company won't block you).

And hey! It's open sourced which means I can plug into it with my script, that gathers email addresses from several sources!

All in all very simple yet powerful mailing manager. If it has any serious drawbacks, I didn't encounter those.