I agree, Coffee Cup software would be miles easier to use and end up looking better, particularly if you set your own themes to either newsletters or adverts, means that you could template a regularly mail and simply change the contents.

Outlook is simply awful, and my emails do not look good when I send them out. It would be nice if there was a monitoring facility as well so you could log responses to each campaign.

PLEASE!!

incidentally this wouldnt be for spamming it would be for legitimate marketing.

Why not use WORD or OpenOffice to create your newsletter, and save as a PDF and email that, you won't have to learn a new piece of software and you can have http links in them to track responses.

On your site you can have the form to sign up to the newsletter and then just add the email address to your group mailing list, that way nothing is stored online and you can use this "no online storage" as your marketing hook,

"Because we respect your privacy, none of your information is stored online, not now, not ever."

Have you looked at Mailchimp who supply a free download of a commercial program for you to use for preparing your newsletters. Also it provides all your other requirements and more. For instance, you can see who opened your newsletter and how many times, also who forwarded it on etc.

I would be happy that the crew from Coffee Cup got on with the new shopping cart program and got it out the door

Ya Mailchip is pretty good, it gives you 3000 free sends per month which is pretty good, I haven't played with the program offline yet, I guess I'll try that tonight or tomorrow too thanks for the tip on that Zoldar, I had forgotten about that.

Now I just gotta figure out how to get people on my email list! LOL

Count me in if they develop a solution...

What It should have is 5-functions.
1.) Ability to set up an html subscription page. For online subscription captures.
Offline we will need the ability to import text/csv/xls/db files directly into the CC data engine.
Unlimited data fields for personalization is a big requirement.

2.) Ability to select and manipulate the data fields. Edit, Copy/paste etc.
Be able to select a range to send or just one email if a resend is neccessary.

3.) Ability to build either HTML or text based emails. Ability to build editable tables and bullet lists.
Easy integration of the data into the template. Integration of preferance protocols for setting up the smtp server.

4.) Reporting capability. Integrate with Google ???

5) Ability to switch from email output to "print" output of varible data templates. hmmmmmm

I could go on forever!!!!!

Yep I would go for such a bit of software too. To create any mailings for my clients I use increditmail at the moment and design my own layouts, but even this is limited. A mailing software package with a database by CC would be great

Wikmail (for a fraction of the cost of Incredimail unless you're using the free version, which Wikmail also has) has the ability to use source code markup right in the program to create emails. I don't know if Incredimail has this feature presently, but up until about a year ago when I switched from it, it didn't have that feature. You can input the HTML code directly to the email and style it how you like it etc. (of course within the guidelines of Email markup which are still pretty old code styles). Nice feature of the program if you're using the email client to directly do your campaigning.

If not, give MailChimp a try, that's a pretty good free source for up to 3000 emails per month. Pretty good setup so far http://www.mailchimp.com/