Update: We have been using poMMo for a solid month now with one of our clients and unfortunately we can no longer recommend it as a high-quality piece of email marketing software. It appears to have been out of active development for some time (Latest release was Apr 03 2008) and while there is a community around poMMo, it’s limited in its ability to support issues.
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While Blue Ember Design does offer its own email marketing solution, we occasionally have some smaller clients that want to use self-hosted email marketing software. Although not typically advisable, we do allow it for some clients with small subscriber lists (the idea being that it will get them started and they can move over later).
Up until last week, we really were pretty disappointed with many of the open source email marketing software options. In the past we have implemented GNU Mailman as well as PHPMailer-ML for our clients, but each of these has their major downfalls. Mailman just feels way too bulky, takes too much hand editing for configuration, and is a beast for client training. PHPMailer-ML was simple to configure, but had a pretty clunky interface. We also ran into some issues with the database connection being dropped while sending leaving us no clue where it left off. So the search for a great free email marketing solution continued. Enter poMMo.
poMMo is very easy to configure and has a decent looking, easy-to-use interface. There is one configuration file that really only required MySQL database connection information and the system is off and running. It self-installs and does it in a way that it could be run “out-of the box”. Of course we do customize the HTML emails for our customers, but that was just as easy with its email template feature.
Here are some of the features we like about poMMo:
- Email throttling (by total emails sent and by destination domain)
- Auto generated HTML subscription forms
- Custom field collection (First Name, Last Name, City, State, etc.)
- Groups for mailing a subset of the full subscriber list
- HTML and Text-Only email options
- Email history stored as HTML pages for archiving. This is great for mail reader issues with HTML.
Known Issues and Desired Features
- There is an issue with the admin interface in Firefox where the body of the content falls below the sidebar. This is just a small CSS issue that can be fixed with some slight tweaking.
- The system is set up to have an email address that receives bounces, but there is no automated bounce processor. It would be nice if it could automatically unsubscribe invalid addresses after a set number of bounces.
- When composing emails, poMMo uses FCKeditor to allow for advance editing. The software doesn’t display the ‘Source’ button to view the email as HTML. This would be nice for advanced users that want to hand manipulate their email’s HTML. Just a small hang up =)
Comments
16 Comments
I’ve been using pommo for more than a year now and I’m glad to say it has no equal, the email bounce feature I handle using eMail Bounec Handler the just manually erasing the bounce emails… no real problems here, everything is perfect, the only thing I don’t like is that eventually the lack of development will send this incredible well crafted application to the trash. So much, so good and so little interest from php programmers out there.
Thanks for the comment, Samuel. We are very much of the same opinion as you. For a free open source email marketing solution we haven’t seen anything better that poMMo. Hopefully the project is not totally dead or someone else will pick it up and carry on.
Hi, I read that pommo has the feature of throttling sending of emails. But I can’t find any tutorial or guidelines how to set that throttling emails sending. Can you guys help me and give a link for that. Thank you very much.
@apple – There are some pretty good directions within poMMo about how to set the throttling parameters. For the sake of being helpful, here are some basic instructions:
Go to Setup from the Admin Menu.
Go to Configure from the Setup Page.
Click on the Mailings tab.
Click on ‘Set mailing throttle values’.
Set the rates as desired:
Mail Rate – Number of mails to send per second.
Bandwidth Limit – How much data to transfer per second.
Period Interval – The amount of time in a period.
Mail Rate – Same as above except in relation to a given domain and across the Period Interval.
Bandwidth Limit – Same as above except in relation to a given domain and across the Period Interval.
Hope you find this to be helpful!
Your “Update” is completely non-helpful. How about at least listing the issues that you came across to no longer recommend it as a high-quality piece of email marketing software?
Out of active development really means little for OSS in my opinion. Give details and I might just fix them myself
@John – Thanks for the comment and you make a good point that perhaps the update wasn’t as complete as it should have been. Here are some thoughts:
We saw some issues with throttling enabled, poMMo would sometimes send out all of the mails and other times crash mid-cycle. Try to restart the send and it would start the email from the beginning of the list, creating duplicates. Not too professional for a company trying to manage its image with customers. At the same time, throttling is a must-have for sending from a self-hosted solution because most hosting providers flip out if more than a couple hundred emails go out every hour. That alone was a deal breaker for us.
There is no bounce processor within poMMo, so all bounces have to be monitored and hand-removed from the email list. Too much of a hassle for clients whose focus is their business, not sending marketing emails.
The admin design is slightly broken in Firefox (minor issue). We did a CSS fix ourselves for our clients, but it was a small hassle.
Because poMMo is pretty decent we had considered doing fixes ourselves as well, but decided it wasn’t worth the time since we offer our own email marketing software. The cost to send out email is so low that to use an open source solution and sacrifice features and simplicity just didn’t seem worth it.
How I send mails with the field reply?
I mean the address from is diferent to the reply address.
how I do that?
In the Open Source tradition, how about sharing the Firefox CSS issue?
Hey John, Thanks for the reply. I apologize that I don’t exactly remember as it has been a while since I did the fix, but I remember that it was a floating issue along with a width issue on the main admin dashboard screen. I’d be happy to look at it again if you could use a second pair of eyes.
Hi Garrett,
So if not poMMo, what are you guys using as your internal email marketing software these days? Is it something you developed 100% from ground zero, or is it something you developed further? We are looking at providing high value services to our clients in Mongolia & Colorado.
Any tips & pointers would be greatly appreciated. Please feel free to email me directly.
Cheers
@mergenchuluun @webguruco
Has anyone looked at phplist and DaDamail (written in perl, not a fan)?
Hey Mike – I’ve definitely used PHPList, but it feels too clunky to me. Configuration wasn’t any too simple. Most of my clients that used it at the time ended up needing a fair amount of training.
I’ve never used DaDamail, so can’t speak to that. Let me know if you have a chance to set it up and try it out. Would love to hear about good, free options.
Pommo was my hero. Very good email marketing software.
The problem is that they stopped the development.
I have tried OpenEMM it only works if you have a Shell access which most of the shared web hosting company do not offer.
Looking to try DaDamail
When one hits the subscribe button he gets to another subscribe page. I believe this is rewdundant. How to remove this second page?
I wish to modify the submit form to show field name such as city, state, ..etc. i can create a field in configuration. The form that collect user data is fixed to “field …” how can i modify this text.
Though poMMo is one of the best email marketing software but most of the emails are ending up in spam folder. Tried hard to fix up the setting but in vain. Looking for some help.