Acajoom News
    Good start, August 1, 2006 |
Let me start by saying that Acajoom is not a bad product, I just feel that it has a way to go yet before it is usable in a production system. That being said it is better than any other mass mailing system I have tried to use with Joomla.
Acajoom support multiple Lists, each with its own subscriber, and multiple newsletters per list. The subscriber list may be started with the existing Joomla User database (Community Builder supported), and new users can be automatically added to a list.
Acajoom has comprehensive statistics gathering and reporting on the messages sent, unfortunately it does not seem to work for me. I can view the statistics pages, but everything is blank.
My single biggest complaint is that my very first production e-mail attempt crashed about 12% of the way through. Instead of launching a background process to send the e-mails, Acajoom tries to send them all in a page load. I'm sure this is fine for small lists, but mine is almost 700. The good news is that unlike the built-in Joomla e-mail function, Acajoom actually completes the page load without timing out. There is no recovery system though, to re-send only to failed recipients.
My second complaint is much more minor. The interface to the tool, while pretty and effective is a bit troublesome. Sometimes it just doesn't work as expected (back button), while other times it seems glitchy.
Overall a great start, but I would like to see it cleaned up a bit. I would like the ability to better control the specific parameters of sending mail, as well as a recovery tool for failed send attempts. I would also like to be able to build lists automatically based upon a specific field in the User table (Community Builder support would be great). That way you could build a list for, say, everybody in a specific state or country and have the list keep itself up-to-date automatically based upon the users' profiles.
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