A Review on Email Go Getter System (EGGS)
EGGS is a new autoresponder system that I have started to use recently. The main difference between EGGS and other commercial autoresponders out there is that EGGS is hosted and run entirely on your own web server. This poses many benefits:
*There is no limit to the number of subscribers you can have. It all depends on the amount of web hosting space and bandwidth you have.
*EGGS is capable of sending approximately 200,000 mails in 2 hours, but it depends on the size of the message. The greater the size, the longer the time.
*You own the software and the list; nobody can have a look at how many subscribers you have.
*Unlimited number of autoresponders and messages.
*Ability to send broadcasts.
*Emails will not be filtered off automatically. One main problem that I had with other commercial autoresponders like freeautobot and getresponse was that their emails are sometimes not delivered to hotmail or yahoomail. This is because their ip had been put on a 'to filter off' list. No such problems with EGGS as the email are sent from your own server. Of course, your email content must be clean as it might still be filtered off by spam filters.
*Single or double opt-in/removal available.
*Both html and text supported.
The best thing of all is that this software is free! You can download it and offer to donate any amount you like. Donors are even given a link on the main page as a form of recognition.
However, there can never be a perfect software out there. There are some disadvantages to EGGS:
*You have to do some installation of the software on your server. However, the manual is pretty detailed and I have no problems with the installation. In the worst case where you can't get it installed, there's always the option of paying them to get it installed for you.
*You can't select the fields you require in your database. You are stuck with name and email only.
*There isn't a test function. So if you want to see how your list of 7 emails look, you will have to set the messages to 1 day apart and wait 7 days to receive all the messages. Of course, you can overcome this problem by sending one message at a time but it's a bit tedious.
*You can't browse through and see the details of the subscribers in your list. You will have to do it by either exporting the list to a text file and looking at it or browsing the raw database table (in sql) itself.
*You can't select the users whom you want to send broadcast to. All broadcasts are sent to all users. So, I had to manually set up another mailing list to use as my test list.
*There is a single line advertisement to EGGS right at the end of the message. You can edit the code to remove it but I have no problems promoting such a good software.
*There's a slight bug with the unsubscribe email send out. Apparently, it's sent as html even though I had put it as a text message. So, I had to change some of the text. Not a major problem as I wouldn't worry how the message look to a unsubsriber anyway.
*Inability to track whether the email was opened and for clickthroughs. So, I had to depend on my weblogs to check for clickthroughs.
*If you add a new message to your current autoresponder, it will be sent to your entire mailing list! I learnt it the hard way but thankfully there's no serious damage.
All in all, a pretty simple autoresponder to use once it has been set up. At the cost (free) and the features I'm getting, I guess I can have no complaints. However, I do hope they can improve on some of the things that I have mentioned above.