e-Campaign is a bulk email program that the Community Foundation of Sarasota County (CFSC) has been using since 2004 to send out eNewsletters, announcements for upcoming events, etc. It sends "customized" emails so that when the user receives the email message, it's addressed directly to him/her. The name of the vendor/developer is LmhSoft.
The email messages are sent in HTML format. Although e-Campaign includes HTML editing capability, it's pretty weak. The folks at CFSC usually create the email message in some other program like FrontPage, and then paste it into e-Campaign.
You can download a trial version of e-Campaign that lets you send mailing of up to 50 recipients. If you want to sent to more than 50, e-Campaign isn't cheap. There's a standard edition and a professional edition. CFSC uses the professional edition, which supports unlimited email addresses and allows the use of the CC and BCC fields. The Pro edition costs $180 per user. The Standard edition costs $100 per user.
The "per user" licensing is pretty strict. Even if 2 users share the same computer, if both use the program, you need to have two licenses. LmhSoft monitors this pretty closely. We had one employee leave the company, and a new employee took the same position and started using e-Campaign. LmhSoft notified me that they detected that more than one person was using the program and that we needed to buy more licenses. I explained the situation, and they allowed the license to be transferred to the new employee. How did they know? I suspect that when e-Campaign sends out email, it automatically sends one or more copies of the message to an email address (or multiple email addresses) at LmhSoft, but I don't know for sure.
The support for e-Campaign hasn't been bad, though it's only through email. Somebody gets back to you within a couple of hours. They've been able to address all of the problems that I submitted.
If you are interested in learning more about e-Campaign, you can go to the following link: http://www.lmhsoft.com.
DotNetNuke supports the sending of customized bulk HTML-based emails, as well. In fact, you can configure DNN so that users can use the website to opt-in or opt-out of receiving newsletters themselves. Unfortunately, CFSC didn't know about DNN back in 2004. They will eventually migrate our bulk email function over to DNN at some point in the future.
In the meantime, CFSC is continuing to use e-Campaign. Below is a short list of problems that the CFSC folks run into with e-Campaign every once in a while, and the solutions to those problems.