By: Brandon Eley

January 4th, 2003

Reader Rating: 7.5

Do you have an email newsletter and need a reliable solution to manage subscribers, unsubscribers and even those pesky undeliverable messages? Are you looking for a professional, easy-to-use all-in-one solution? Infacta's Group Mail software for Windows may be the answer you’re looking for.

Group Mail offers three versions... Free, Pro and Plus. At $0, $79.95 and $179.95 respectively you’ll be able to find a version to fit your needs and your budget. Download and try the Free version to test the software. If you have a very small mailing list, the free version may be adequate, but it lacks the feature that makes Group Mail stand out above the competition: plug-ins, which we’ll discuss a little later.

Which Program's For You?

So, what's the difference between the versions? Here's a rundown of the basic feature list for each program:

Group Mail Free

• Personal Send Mode only
• Limited Address Book Import Support
• No Plug-in support
• Send to a max of 100 recipients at a time

Group Mail Pro

• Bulk Sending Capabilities
• Direct Sending (doesn't use your ISP's mail server)
• Import address books and distribution lists from Outlook Express, Eudora, Opera 6, AOL 7, and Netscape
• Free Plug-ins

Group Mail Plus

• All the Group Mail Pro features plus...
• Send Mobile SMS Text Messages
• Sends MUCH faster
• Import Outlook, Group Wise, Lotus Notes, Exchange and PINE address books and distribution lists
• Import directly from any ODBC or OLE DB/ADO compatible database
• Free Plug-ins

Plug-ins – The Good Stuff

Both the Pro and Plus versions of Group Mail support additional plug-ins that’s are available for download for free from Infacta's Website. The plug-ins allow you to customize your Group Mail to suit your newsletter’s needs. Install only the extra modules you need, or install them all. Listed below are the additional plug-ins that are available:

• Database Importer
• Email Inspector
• GroupHTML (Email Creator)
• Subscriber
• Backup
• GroupMerge
• GroupPurge

You can find out more about these plug-ins at the Infacta plug-in page [1].

My Professional Opinion

For 99% of users, Group Mail will more than handle all their email newsletter needs. This software has shaved countless hours off our business’s email newsletter maintenance. The software subscribes new recipients (or they can be imported from any current database in minutes), unsubscribes removals, deletes bad email addresses and even allows you to compose messages right in the program with the help of a free plug-in. It also shows a great running log as it sends messages, so you can see how many succeeded, failed, and how many excluded members you have.

Not only that, but Group Mail sends two-part MIME messages so you don't have to worry about whether or not your readers can handle HTML emails. If they can't, they'll get a text version automatically! This is a very useful feature for anyone who’s serious about their mailing list. It’s much easier than managing two separate email lists: one for HTML and one for text only.

You may be thinking that the program must be overly complicated to contain all these features. On the contrary, Group Mail was easy to install and even easier to learn. It’s intuitive, easy-to-use interface had me emailing in minutes! I didn’t have to read one page of the manual. It’s simple -- just set up a sender, an email list, and create an email! Here’s a screenshot of the main interface –- I think you’ll agree, it’s pretty hard to go wrong with such an intuitive layout.

The Cons...

You may be thinking, "This sounds great, but what are the cons?" Well, after using this software with our 2000+ member mailing list for several months the only "con" I can come up with is that Group Mail is a local program that resides on your PC. While this could also be considered a "pro", it does use a large amount of system resources to send personalized email to thousands of recipients. We have a separate computer solely for newsletter management, but most people will not be able to do this. My advice in that case would be to send your newsletters at night, when you won't be using your PC.

Group Mail has won so many awards I can’t list them all here… a few are ZDNet Editor’s Pick, Freeware Guide’s Program of the Month, Cool Tool Award and Tucows 5x Cows Award. From the awards and testimonials listed on their site, you’ll see I’m not the only supporter of this software.

Final Words

If you need to manage an email newsletter and don’t want to go with an online solution, this is your tool. I’d definitely recommend this software to anyone, from novice to expert.

Overall Score: 5 out of 5
Product Information:
Infacta Group Mail Free/Pro/Plus
Operating System: Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000 or XP (the Email Inspector plug-in requires Windows 98 or higher).
For more information: http://www.infacta.com [2]

[1] http://www.infacta.com/plug-ins.asp#
[2] http://www.infacta.com