SURVEY: What do you use OpenEMM for?

Use this forum to suggest new features, language support, documentation, etc. for OpenEMM's roadmap

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maschoff
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SURVEY: What do you use OpenEMM for?

Post by maschoff »

I would like to start a ist of real-world OpenEMM installations in our wiki to show all people interested in OpenEMM that the software is not a hobbyist's tool but is used for commercial projects.

Therefore, I would appreciate it if you answer this note with examples of how you use OpenEMM (description of project, URL, # of emails per month, ...).

Thanks in advance!
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skoehler
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Post by skoehler »

A customer of mine will use OpenEMM to send their newsletters.
More than 20000 mails are sent once per month.

But since i discover problem by problem, i think the user-community of OpenEMM is not big enough yet. The problems are trivial or at least trivial to discover: missing form-fields, wrong reply-to header, missing UTF-8 import, wrong database-connection setup, missing decoding of & in links, etc.

I think, users and administrators out there need more guidance - i.e. on how to setup a proper utf-8 connection to mysql even if mysqld's default is latin1. And the OpenEMM-community must grow so that these trivial problems get eliminated. I wonder that nobody alerted you about the missing reply-address field (see hotfixes in wiki) which results in a broken reply-to-header, asked for a utf-8 import (to really preserve foreign characters) or alerted you about the problem with links that contain an &.

I'm just a co-admin. The main admin has less knowledge about Java, JSP, charsets, MySQL, etc. - i'm trying to help out as good as i can.
jim_frey
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Post by jim_frey »

I've got one installation doing a few things. It's one hosted dedicated server that I pay $100 a month for --
IP Space-1 IP Address
Memory-1 GB
Monthly Transfer-2000 GB
Operating System-CentOS 4
Port Speed-10 Mbit Port
Primary Hard Drive -80 GB
Processor-Athlon XP 2100+
That server hosts a few domains -
http://www.spidercement.com
http://www.duncecapjokes.com
http://www.twekd1.com

http://www.spidercement.com - This is the domain I have OpenEMM set up under. All my emails are sent out as noreply@openemm.spidercement.com

http://www.carguygarage.com - This is actually a Yahoo store, but I link it over to http://www.spidercement.com to run the mailing lists. The mailing list for http://www.carguygarage.com is currently about 7,000 subscribers and gets send out about 3 times a month. I really need to set up all the triggers in OpenEMM to manage this list better, but I haven't had the time to do it yet. This list grew quickly, we had about 1,600 people sign up in one day -- no problems.

http://www.duncecapjokes.com - This is a joke mailing list that's really just a hobby I started years ago when I was still in college. I actually took this site down for a few years and just got it back up a couple months ago. When I found OpenEMM, I switched from the idea of starting the site back up with www.slashcode.org over to using OpenEMM instead. The Dunce Cap Jokes mailing list had over 35,000 people on it when I took it down, and when I fired out the first mailing to the list that was 3 years old, OpenEMM cleared 18,000 bounce messages without a problem. That's when I knew this was a serious application.

http://www.twekd1.com - This is just my brother's race car. I wrote a little Perl script http://www.openemm.org/forums/ftopic256.html so that I could run virtual domains in Apache along with OpenEMM in the same box so I could still host these little project sites without any issues.


There's nothing else that comes close to what OpenEMM does, especially with the time delay of follow-up emails -- open source or otherwise. I can see that this application can basically replace the need for a full time marketing manager once the emails have been set up to trigger in the application.
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tgilbert328
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Jun 13, 2007 4:20 pm

Newletters

Post by tgilbert328 »

My company uses this product as a replacement for a monthly service fee to a market leading email marketing company. We have several newsletters which we send out a few times per week. In total we send about 1 million emails per month to about 50,000 subscribers.

We decided to bring the service in house to:

1) save money
2) own the deployment
3) be able to quickly update lists and sync those updates to our main database.

I agree with the previous user, the community is too new and the knowledge of the community is low. I fully recognize that this product is the gift to the community by EMM, and I am very appreciative of their approach to the market. I expect that they hope that we will use their paid-for-services, but I sort of wish they dedicated a bit more time to documenting and educating the community to give the community a jump start on product knowledge. The wiki is an important step, but unless I am missing something obvious, the wiki isn't community editable.

I wish I could help more, my knowledge of the product is reasonable but since I don't have very much java/python/sendmail experience my technical knowledge is limited to GNU/Linux and MySql experience. Short of porting to c/php/postfix, I am limited in what I can do to help... I chose this product because in my opinion is it superiour to other similar programs like PHPList and others I tried. I would have prefered to use technologies I am comfortable with, but in this case it just wasn't practical.

The community has a chicken and egg situation. We need more technical people willing to help out which depends on adoption, but we won't get adoption until there is stronger community support.

Tim
maschoff
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It's getting better every day

Post by maschoff »

Thanks for your feedback so far! Although, we are still at the beginning with OpenEMM (the RC1 came out just 1 year ago), I think we (the developers and the community) have already achieved a lot:

- a small but growing and compared to its size very supportive community
- all verified bug reports from community are fixed or will be fixed (bugfix release for 5.1 is coming soon)
- a version each for Linux, VMware and Windows (Windows version is the easiest to install)
- an excellent German book ( http://www.agnitas.de/buch2.shtml )

The wiki ist editable, but you have to register first. i.e. skoehler already contributed some valueable information!

IMHO, the OpenEMM project ist getting better every day - slowly, but steadily. Stay tuned!
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newwisdom
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Joined: Thu Oct 23, 2008 10:04 am

Post by newwisdom »

I have to agee with the other posters here - without wanting to look the gifthorse in the mouth, more support would be great.

This product has huge potential and I think many will be put off by the lack of support available
maschoff
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Post by maschoff »

OpenEMM Maintainer
jim_frey
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Post by jim_frey »

We really use OpenEMM a lot now so I decided to get a bigger machine to put it on, now I'm running the latest version of OpenEMM on --

- Processor: Intel Xeon 3.0 GHz (w/HTT)
- 2nd Processor: Intel Xeon 3.0 GHz (w/HTT)
- Motherboard: Supermicro X6DVL-EG2
- Memory: 2 GB
- Primary Hard Drive : 250 GB SATA II
- Secondary Hard Drive: 250 GB SATA II
- Hardware RAID: RAID 1 (3Ware 8006-2LP)
- Operating System: RedHat ES 5
- IP Space: 1 IP Address
- Port Speed: 100 Mbit Port
- Monthly Transfer: 2000 GB

The www.carguygarage.com mailing list is about 17,000 email addresses now and we're setting up as much of the action based mailings as we can. If we can set up more time delay options, we're hoping to set up this application to automatically send out mailings to people for months with action based triggers to follow up with people if/when they click on something.

There is nothing out there that comes close to this application for email management, it's the perfect fit for ecommerce.
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pheelix
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Post by pheelix »

We use OpenEMM for about 1000 emails per month.

As we are an small ISP and have our own datacenter, we do not use a dedicated machine for OpenEMM. There is a virtual machine with CentOS installed and resource allocation on demand.
The virtual infrastructure is based on BladeCenters so there is enough power behind it.
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