It is a fact that email marketing is also useful to small and medium-sized entities. Whereas spam emailing is simple, but illegal, legal and serious email marketing requires some adequate technical equipment and so far could only be provided by external service providers or using expensive computer software. These solutions, however, were often too expensive for small and medium-sized entities (SMEs). Now an interesting open source alternative called OpenEMM is made available free of charge by the Munich based Agnitas email marketing company for download.
With their “E-marketing Manager 5.0” Agnitas have already been offering a commercial and more efficient email marketing software for some time. “Our E-marketing manager is a very powerful highend solution and therefore not the optimal software for SMEs” said Mrs. Ulrike Leipnitz, who is a spokeswoman for Agnitas, to the Pressetext news agency. She added that the OpenEMM which is free of charge and leaves out several premium and special features (e.g. multi-post running) provides an alternative to SMEs.
Of course Agnitas hope that a wider use of the open source version will lead to their software becoming the de facto standard as well as prompt companies to buy the commercial version later on.
The software requirements for the running of OpenEMM are easy to comply with and also open source. OpenEMM is available in two different versions: as RPM package for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Compatible and as Tarball for all other Linux versions. In addition you need MySQL, Java, Tomcat (not the complete server) and Sendmail. 