Any simple alternative to MailChimp? 1

[Mike Lewis]

I recently volunteered to give technical help to a small charity. One of my tasks is to send out occasional mailings to my fellow volunteers, and I am looking for some software or on-line service to help with this. I considered using MailChimp, but it looks far too sophisticated for my modest needs, with loads of features that I would never use.

In summary, this is what I need:

1. To send 20 - 30 emails per year to our volunteers.

2. We have about 75 volunteers, divided into three groups). Some emails will go to all three groups, others to just one or two of the groups.

3. Most importantly, I want to let other members of the charity's committee send out emails, without reference to myself, and without my giving them copies of the mailing list. This is mainly for reasons of privacy, and also because I don't want to have to worry about keeping multiple copies of the list up to date.

I don't need any kind of marketing tools, templates, newsletter creation tools, statistical analyses, A/B testing, or the many similar features that MailChimp offers. The emails will simply consist of some formatted text with a logo and a standard heading.

If anyone can suggest something suitable, I would be grateful.

Mike


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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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[Mike Lewis]

I'm not surprised I didn't receive any replies to this request. I've done a bit more research, and there appears to be nothing on the market that meets my needs. There are plenty of CRM-type system (such as MailChimp) designed for professional email marketing campaigns, but nothing suitable for occasional use by non-technical users. And nothing that would prevent the mailing list being exposed, which is a key point.

So in the end I decided to develop my own solution. I wrote a program that uses Automation to create mail items in Microsoft Outlook. The program lets the user enter the message text, then extracts the email addresses from the database (which already exists), creates the mail item (optionally based on a template), places the addresses in the BCC box, and then sends it. The user needs Outlook to be installed, but doesn't interact with Outlook in any way.

It all seems to be working OK now. And I probably spent less time developing it than I did fruitlessly searching for an off-the-shelf tool.

I am posting this just in case anyone else has a similar problem. (For what it's worth, I used Visual FoxPro to write the program, but I think I could have used any tool that can act as an Automation client.)

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads