PHP Freaks

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 [http://pommo.org/Main_Page]. 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 [http://pommo.org/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.