Your Questions About Email Marketing Software

Jere answers:

Well for starters, let’s cover the freeware versions of antivirus available and cover why they often fall short.

The freeware version of AVG (as opposed to the upgraded commercial version) covers the bare necessities of security, with a simple, straightforward graphical user interface (GUI) nearly anyone can use. However, it does have a relatively low detection rate of viruses (about 81%, but who’s keeping score?) and a rate of false positives that is higher than most, meaning it will detect a virus when there is none. The free copy also does not include adware or spyware removal and support for the product is limited. While it does have safe-mode support, a nice perk for a freeware AV, it has little rootkit detection, no registry scans, no firewall, and has recently acquired a larger resource-footprint with the addition of email scanners, a browser toolbar, and a link-scanner. With the spotty protection and gaining resource requirements, AVG is becoming less useful as the “lightweight” alternative to Symantec or others and overall does not do an effective job at properly protecting a system.

Avast! Home Edition is another free security suite which protects against viruses, spyware, and rootkits, as well as P2P and IM scanning. It includes a webshield which scans all HTTP traffic, and a light firewall which uses signature-based detection to scan for known worms and viruses. It also has 64-bit compatibility, making it a good choice for some of the newer systems on the market. While all these features give an adequate level of protection for the price, the resource-heavy features again tend to make Avast! A bit slow to begin virus scanning. Overall, this is one of the best free security applications.

While there are several popular freeware antivirus applications out there, they all tend to have the same flaws: weak or no firewall, high false positive rating (to scare users into buying the “better” edition, I suspect), little or no rootkit and trojan protection, no real-time scanning, no “self-defense” application (making the AV themselves vulnerable to attack), and general incompatibility. While these tend to be general problems, they typically stem from the goal of the application trying to be “light” and “simple”, while unfortunately tending to sacrifice security itself.

As far as the paid versions, they tend to fix all the problems mentioned above, but have the curse of popularity to deal with. Symantec and Mcafee being the two main examples, the popularity of these has become so great that often malware coders won’t release the code into “the wild” (the public) until it can pass as clean. This allows the virus itself to bypass the most popular forms of protection and potentially infect more computers for longer. In my own opinion, the best overall security suite is Kaspersky, which has a lighter footprint than competing products, has better overall security than free versions, and is priced reasonably for a yearly subscription.

Jere answers:

Send an email with link on your organization’s list serve.

Jere answers:

1) You can download and setup Free and OpenSource Email Campaign Manager PHP Script Phplist(http://www.phplist.com) in your website.
(or)
2) Use Email Marketing Software like nMailDirect – http://www.nmaildirect.com for your group mailing requirements

Jere answers:

An email marketing software is simply just like the name states it is. Is it a software that business use to help market themselves or a product/service that they are offering through email.

The main people who benefit it are of course are the people who use it, which are businesses. A lot of businesses will use the software and send out massive amount emails to people about a sale or some sort of promo. Some of those people will be interested in the sale and will go to the store to buy it. In turn, the business makes money.

Hope that helps.

Jere answers:

Hi Surjz,

Email marketing software is a good thing but in the hands of someone who is inexperienced, it can be a bad thing.

If you are a business then you will of course want to keep in touch with your customers and if you collect their email addresses then you can use email software to send them emails.

Its important to get software that allows subscribers to unsubscribe from your mailings or they will get annoyed, plus it is a legal requirement these days anyway! In the wrong hands it can be used to send loads of emails that nobody requested, aka “spam” and is the scourge of the internet!

These days you’d be far better to go for a managed service such as those from aweber or getresponse (etc.). Not only will they be spam-act compliant, but they boast far better deliverability rates than you or I could manage ourselves.

I hope this helps.

Shaun