Review: Gammadyne Mailer 16.5

Gammadyne Mailer 16.5
Gammadyne Software, LLC
10025 Mastin
Overland Park, KS 66212-5415

Greg Wittmeyer, owner and chief programmer
Note: the URL includes my affiliate code
http://gammadyne.com/refer.php?ref=10045&page=mmail.htm
support@gammadyne.com
US $119

Gammadyne Mail is a powerful e-mail automation program for PC Windows desktops and servers that sends personalized text and HTML e-mail, as well as processing incoming e-mail such as sign-ups, opt-outs, and bounce-backs. It works directly with your existing ODBC-compliant database, such as Microsoft Access, allowing it to integrate nicely with the tools you use everyday.

I've been using e-mail sending programs for years and switched to Gammadyne Mailer more than a year ago because I needed a more robust program that would handle both text and HTML sent together in multi-part MIME. As I gradually learned the various features of Gammadyne, I left my previous mailer entirely. Gammadyne can do nearly everything I need in a desktop mailer, and more.

Software generally trades simplicity for power. Typically, the more "user-friendly" the application, the fewer options you are given. Gammadyne is designed for extreme flexibility, so new users may find it somewhat daunting. Wizards lead you through the set-up procedure for the most common functions (Send Operation, Bounce-Back Processing, Opt-Out Processing, Sign-Up Processing, and List Serving). Help screens provide detailed explanations of both simple and advanced features. But the learning curve may be somewhat steep.

Database Compatibility

Gammadyne Mailer's primary focus is sending personalized e-mails from any kind of list, especially any ODBC compatible database.

A "send operation" wizard leads you through the process of set-up. Once you have the details correct, you save a "project" file that allows you to repeat this operation in the future.

The first task is to identify recipients. Gammadyne is very flexible here. You can paste a list of e-mail addresses into a window, link to a text list of e-mail addresses, or even use a comma-delimited list of e-mail addresses with names, addresses, etc. If you need to combine several lists, Gammadyne allows you to exclude duplicates from the final mailing or exclude specific domains (or e-mail addresses) from an e-mailing.

Gammadyne does not maintain its own internal e-mail database. E-mail sending programs that require you to export your data to a text comma-delimited file strip you of your ability to use powerful SQL commands and to maintain your database using powerful database tools. What separates Gammadyne from some of its competitors is its ability to connect to any ODBC compliant database, so long as you have a driver for it. To use the powerful database feature, you must first register the database using the ODBC Data Sources dialog found in your Windows Control Panel. Using a MySQL driver, I found I could even connect Gammadyne Mailer to a MySQL database hosted on my webserver -- so long as my Internet connection is uninterrupted. Unfortunately Gammadyne can't yet connect to Outlook Express and Outlook 98/2000 contact databases.

Once you've registered the database, Gammadyne asks you to identify the table within the database that you'll be accessing. With Microsoft Access, Gammadyne can connect to queries as well as tables. MS Access Queries allow you to use powerful features to draw on data from multiple tables of a database, and select just the group of records to which you want to e-mail. Alternatively, Gammadyne allows you to designate values from a menu of fields to help you select which records to e-mail. Subscription_Expiration_Date > "2/12/2002", for example, would select only records of current subscribers. If you know SQL, you can paste in a complete SQL WHERE statement into Gammadyne for complex selections from your database.

Since Gammadyne can both read from and write to the database, I've found it useful to add two fields to my Access table: Last_Mailout_Date and Bounce_Count. The former field keeps track of records mailed to in case there is an interruption in the e-mailing (lost an Internet connection or a computer crash). Bounce_Count marks the records of bad e-mail addresses that experience hard bounces.

After you have registered the database and selected the table you are using, you are asked to identify two required fields: recipient e-mail address and unique record identifier. You can also select the field in which to store the date the last e-mail was successfully sent.

E-Mail Merge

What separates Gammadyne from bulk mailers is its ability to personalize each individual e-mail that is sent out. This is tremendously important these days when you are competing for attention with an increasing flood of spam sent indiscriminately to millions of e-mail addresses.

For example, when you can include the recipient's first name in the subject line, the open-rate goes up dramatically. When your message includes the recipient's name and company, order data, and a specialized offer, your e-mail marketing efforts or newsletter become much more efficient.

Gammadyne identifies database fields with double brackets. For example, a message might begin as "Dear [[First_Name]]" in a very personal way. But since the program's extensive proprietary database language G-Merge includes dozens of built-in functions, you can manipulate the data in a number of ways as you are sending out the e-mail. Look at these examples:

• Math calculations: "The circumference is [[2 * 3.14159 * radius]]"
• If/then statements. "Dear [[if gender=1]]Sir[[else]]Ma'am[[endif]]"
• Date formatting: February 5, 2002 or 2/2/02, etc.
• Date calculations: "You can call for free support until [[date_add_months(purchase_date, 2)]]," which displays a date two months from the purchase date in your database.

E-Mail Formatting

Gammadyne allows you to send out e-mail as text, HTML-email, or a combination of both as multi-part MIME. Text is always shown before HTML, so if your recipient's e-mail program can't read HTML e-mails, she'll see text rather than HTML-code gobbledy-gook. If you like, you can format the HTML and text separately (I do), or you can allow Gammadyne to create text for you from your HTML. (Easy, but not nearly as nice as you can do yourself.) HTML e-mail can be sent with embedded graphics (which increases the file size) or with graphics that pull images from the Web (but only work when the recipient is connected to the Internet). You can also e-mail one or more attachments.

Gammadyne allows you to type messages directly into a window, but you can scarcely call it an editor. I prepare the HTML and text files separately using Microsoft FrontPage and Word, respectively, and then instruct Gammadyne to access the files directly.

Let Your Imagination Roll

When you combine the ability to work from complex databases with the capacity to send HTML e-mail, you can send out extremely sophisticated e-mailings. To increase my newsletter renewal rate, I constructed complex HTML forms, and populated them with name and address fields from my Access subscriber database. All my subscriber had to do to renew was to insert his credit card information, click the "renew" button, and a secure transaction was completed, so long as the recipient was online.

You can include the customer_number coded within a hyperlink, so that when your customer clicks on the link, your website will immediately recognize him and create an order form.

You can send out e-mails to select groups, or insert featured products in the e-mail according to customer preferences in your database. The possibilities are endless.

If you have a sophisticated link tracker redirect program hosted on your webserver, you can encode the customer_number into each link, so you can track which individual customers clicked on each link. Gammadyne Mailer does not include an integrated link tracker such as those offered by some ASP e-mailing programs.

Is all this easy? No. The more fields you use and the more programs you attempt to integrate, the greater the opportunity for errors. It took me a full day to perfect my e-mail renewal form, with hours and hours of testing and re-testing. But with Gammadyne Mailer, you have an extremely flexible tool that can help you do just about any database e-mailing that you can conceive.

Sending

When you're ready to send out your e-mail, Gammadyne allows you to preview both text and HTML versions of the message -- and send a test e-mail to yourself. I've found that an HTML e-mail can look fine before I send it, but unless I test an actual incoming e-mail for images and merge fields, it's easy to make a mistake.

Gammadyne allows you to select two sending modes -- SMTP server or Direct Delivery. While direct delivery is slower and less reliable, it's necessary if your ISP limits the number of e-mails you can send per hour using their SMTP server. I'm currently using my ISP's SMTP server without any problems.

A feature Gammadyne added a few months ago was multi-threaded sending. Instead of limiting the e-mailing to a linear mail out of one e-mail at a time, you can send several "threads" simultaneously -- as fast as your Internet connection will allow. E-mailing is a complex process with many short wait times, so multi-threading maximizes your outgoing speed. My ISP currently allows three threads at a time. If I were using the direct delivery feature, I might select up to 16 threads to make up for the slower speed of this function. With DSL and 3 threads, Gammadyne screams through my 50K e-mail messages like a hot knife through butter. Multi-threading is very nice!

One problem I've encountered occasionally is my Internet connection going down or my computer crashing while I am sending out e-mails. I am happy to report that Gammadyne has been quite stable on my Windows 98 operating system -- but other programs I use while Gammadyne is running may not be so nice. Gammadyne allows two ways to recover from this. A log file records the e-mail address of each e-mail as it is sent out -- but is wiped out if my computer crashes, too. The best approach is to have Gammadyne insert the date and time the e-mail was sent in a Last_Mailout_Date field of my database. That way if something happens, I can always send to any record that hasn't received the current mailing by selecting this date field. Gammadyne does not have the automatic recovery systems some of its competitors do.

Is This a Spam Program?

Of course, Gammadyne Mailer has many features in common with the best spam mailers, but it is obvious that it was not designed with spam in mind. While it allows you to send identical messages to thousands of recipients (skipping the merge feature), it does not include features designed to trick ISPs with random numbers in the subject, to, and from fields, such as employed by deceptive spam mailers. You can also see the programmer's bias in the help screen comments about untraceable e-mails. He says, "If you want to send untraceable e-mail, then you are obviously a sociopath spammer who should be brained with a heavy club."

Incoming E-Mail Operations

Gammadyne performs typical list maintenance functions. Incoming e-mail functions require you to use a dedicated POP e-mail box from which Gammadyne can download e-mail. Then it scans the e-mail for keywords in the recipient field, subject field, or body, and takes the action for which it is programmed. Fortunately, wizards guide you through setting up the most common operations, subscriptions, unsubscriptions (opt-outs), and bounces. Gammadyne is able to write a new record to your database for every new subscriber. Instead of deleting a record, Gammadyne typically puts an exclamation point (!) in front of an e-mail address to prevent it from being e-mailed to. Bounced e-mails are indicated by a numeral one (1) in the Bounce_Count field.

Unfortunately, Gammadyne doesn't check for subs, unsubs, and bounces in a single operation; each of these is set up as a separate project file. Following instructions in the Help File, I set up the Microsoft Windows Schedule Tasks function with a DOS prompt command line that automatically opens Gammadyne for each operation and then closes it again after completion. I've set it up to perform these three operations once a day, but think I'll extend that to twice a day. It works well, but doesn't operate in the background, but tends to interrupt me while I am working on other programs.

Incoming E-Mail Data Field Extraction

Since Gammadyne comes with a full database language, G-Merge, you can program it to do almost any kind of action associated with e-mail. A common problem e-mail marketers face is collecting visitor data from online forms without retyping it into a desktop database.

Gammadyne makes quick work of e-mails that are spit out by standard online HTML forms. A couple of weeks ago I set up a form which collects a number of data fields from subscribers to a regional church newsletter -- first name, last name, e-mail address, but also church name (inserts a PIN number for each church on a drop-down menu), gender, and a choice of one or more interest areas (24 in all). The HTML form is designed to send standard e-mails that display the data in a predictable manner. In this case, the field name is followed by a colon and a space.

Then I programmed Gammadyne to search incoming e-mails with a particular subject line (e.g. "ABC Newsletter Subscriber"), for each of these fields and insert into my Access database any data fields it finds. Here's the script I created from examples in the Help File.

It ever-so-nicely populates my database without me having to re-type anything. Is this easy? No, there is no wizard to hold my hand, such as is included in Online Automation's Postmaster. But the examples in the Help File are clear enough that I can gradually figure it out and make it work. If you don't know anything about programming, ask a programmer to help you with this the first time.

Gammadyne's ability to be programmed to automate its operations is extremely broad. I don't know of another desktop program committed to e-mail handling with anywhere near its flexibility (outside of full database languages such as ColdFusion).

You'll find a few other accessories included in Gammadyne Mailer -- calendar, calculator, and a character map. A tool you may want to use is one that extracts e-mail addresses from text files while eliminating all the duplicates. Just don't use this to spam all those who have sent you newsletters. :-) You can even schedule e-mailings with project scheduler so e-mail campaigns are sent out when you aren't present, perhaps at hours when then Internet is less cluttered.

I commonly use Gammadyne for my e-mail marketing campaigns of hundreds or thousands of recipients, and I mail to my paid subscriber list using Gammadyne. Given a dedicated server and Internet connection, Gammadyne is no doubt capable of e-mailing to tens of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands. But I don't use Gammadyne to send out and maintain my huge e-mail newsletters (currently 62,000 to 120,000 subscribers). Lists of this size are better performed from a dedicated Web-based listserver with a constant and ample Internet connection.

Gammadyne Mailer is constantly improving, with updates coming out every month or two. The developer is committed to making it the best e-mail automation utility available, and rapidly incorporates changes. What's more, registered users are entitled to free upgrades for life.

Weaknesses

One complaint I have with the version 16.5 is that the incoming mail operation destroys HTML e-mail when it forwards it. But I'm guessing that the problem will be fixed in a month or two.

Gammadyne's strength -- power, flexibility, and the capability of automated operations -- is at the root of its weakness, user-friendliness. Since database operations are inherently complex, and since Gammadyne is so flexible, set-up takes a number of steps, and even with wizards, the potential for one element not to be configured correctly is high. To use this program for much beyond basic e-mail sending functions will take patience and a commitment not to give up.

Gammadyne's online learning tools are rather good -- so far as they go. When you hold your mouse over a button or dialog box, an explanation balloon appears. When you make an error that the program detects, it will often tell you what you did wrong and take you to the exact screen and field where you can correct the problem. Wizards lead you through several basic set-up functions. While the help screens aren't context sensitive, they are rather complete. I just wish there were an easy way to print out all the help screens to make a manual I could study and mark up. No printed documentation comes with Gammadyne.

So far as I'm concerned, I would rather have power than ease-of-use. If you're a computer novice, Gammadyne isn't the program to cut your teeth on. Get help or find something simpler. But if you have some computer experience, desire power, and prefer to be able to manipulate the database with all the software tools you have at your disposal, then I believe Gammadyne Mailer is your best choice in its price category.