There are many email marketing services available but Mailchimp is definately our favourite.

On a recommendation I tried Mailchimp for a new email campaign and I was very impressed with the simplicity and ease of use. The dashboard has clean and friendly design and you can easily switch between your campaigns, your lists, reports and autoresponders from the main tab at the top of the screen.

The email list builder lets you enter detailed information about each client, or you can easily import your list from a text file, a CSV file or from many other services such as Google contacts.

Once you have your list and you’re ready to go, you click on the campaign button and choose either plain text or HTML email. When choosing HTML you are presented with a very easy to use editor. Choose from many templates or easily design your own email.

Then choose which of your saved lists you would like to send the campaign out to, and you are then given a handy checklist to make sure everything is correct before you send.

The step by step process really is quite simple and the interface is very user friendly. I sent our my campaign to 500 subscribers free of charge and I am able to send upto 3000 emails in one month on the free package, but only to the maximum 500 subscribers.

The paid packages start at $30 per month and this gives you a maximum 2,500 subscribers with no sending limit. There are cheaper deals out there but for the fun, easy to use and visually pleasing interface my choice would be Mailchimp.

For full details please visit www.mailchimp.com

The price is $29 for a license with reductions for multi license purchases. For what you get this is a great price.

Hands on support is available if you need any further assistance, but this is doubtful as the author, Jack Born, really has done a good job in making the installation and implementation as easy as possible.

For full details visit Ultimateformmail.com

As i’m sure most of you are aware, spam is a huge problem and it’s not going to go away on it’s own. Most web hosting services will offer their own spam filter but you may find this is not doing the trick. After testing several different third party spam solutions, this rates as the best. It really is an excellent weapon in the ongoing fight against spam.
How does it work? Just like your email client, Mailwasher connects directly to the mail server and detects the spam before it is downloaded to your computer. It then shows you the headers and a snippet of the email. You then either mark the message as spam or agree with Mailwasher’s suspicion that it is spam. Once you are happy with your selections you click on ‘process mail’ and Mailwasher will bounce anything marked as spam and then deliver all the clean mail to your email client. One great advantage this gives you is that Mailwasher will pick up on any emails that contain viruses and delete these attachments along with the email itself.

Download a copy of Mailwasher

MailWasher works with any e-mail and is currently used by over 8 million people. Download the Mailwasher here.

MM FORMS

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CFORMS

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Enhanced WordPress Contact Form

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CONTACT FORM 7

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SECURE FORM MAILER

Below is a few recommended scripts for both CGI and PHP:

• NMS formmail – an alternative to Matt’s Script Archive, developed by the London Perl Mongers
• Tectite – Developed by Root Software this is a very secure and bug free script with strong anti-spam features.
• Gentle Source – Free for private use and non-profit organisations (small fee to purchase a license) this is a great script with many features.
• Formtoemail.com – Again a license fee applies to obtain the pro version, but they also provide a free version with the same easy installation, the same security and free support!
• Formbuddy.com – Free remotely hosted CGI Formmail, form processor and autoresponder. FormBuddy can also store the form data submitted by your visitors, reducing the clutter in your mailbox.
• Matt’s Script Archive – The old favourite still deserves a place on the list. With over 2 million downloads and more every day, it can’t be too bad!

A few to choose from there. Whatever you are after in  form to email script, you should find it in one of the above.

The site is a collection of CGI scripts written in Perl. It was started in1995 by Matt Wright and formmail was originally credited to him. The program is possibly the most widely used  CGI script on the Internet. However in recent years the scrips have come under fire for being outdated and buggy. The experts would now recommend you use an alternative such as NMS.

NMS was started by the London Perl Mongers and was set up to develop drop in replacements for Matt’s scripts. The recommendation to use these alternatives is seconded by Matt himself here on his website. He explains the scripts were written when he was a novice programmer still at school and the scripts have not been updated after 1996.

But people are still happily use Matt’s scripts and as long as he keeps them available, his scripts will be downloaded thousands of times in the future.

So you may want to do a bit of research before you choose the right script for your website.  A list of good scripts (PHP and CGI) can be found here.

FormMail is a script that e-mails the contents of a completed web based form to a specified email addresses. The script captures and processes form contents and sends the information in an email to the recipient. This script can be used by a Web site administrator to maintain records of form data entered and submitted by visitors to the site. that captures and processes form contents and then typically e-mails them to one or more recipients. More commonly it is used for contact us and enquiry forms.

Below is an example of a simple form which uses a cgi script to handle the information. The script itself would be uploaded to your server’s cgi-bin and the form can be easily designed to siot your needs.

And this is what it looks like: