Send Web Page Newsletters On Your Mac. Free.

One thing you gotta admire about Mac application developers is their ability to find a niche ‘need’ and fill it with a simple-to-use app that, well, does the trick.

So it is with Newsletter. A one trick pony that works.

Here’s the deal. You want to create a web page newsletter that you can send to your email list, but you don’t have a web site. That’s common.

What do you do? Use Newsletter. Why? Because it works very well and it’s free.

Your newsletter doesn’t even have to be in HTML, or it can be in HTML and in plain text (perfect for those email users who don’t want to read messages in HTML).

Start the process. Assume you have an email list already. 50 users. 100 users. 1,000 users. Whatever. Assume also that you have content for a newsletter and you want to send the content to your email list.

Now all you need is an HTML editor to format the newsletter’s content so it looks nice. These are steps to have before you use Newsletter, because, remember, it’s a one trick pony. All Newsletter does is send your text content and HTML content to your email list.

Creating the HTML page may be the most difficult task on the list. If you don’t have a process for HTML creation, I can recommend a small basketful.

Try the free TacoHTML, or the excellent SEEdit mini. For only a few dollars you’ll get even faster results with Rapidweaver.

Create your web page newsletter and you’re ready to send it. Using Apple’s Mail application to send a news letter isn’t easy or simple. Mail doesn’t handle outbound HTML messages very well. Newsletter does.

Your newsletter is done and your email list is handy and ready (I’ll cover ways to handle email lists in a later article).

The Newsletter interface couldn’t be easier, simpler, or more obvious. At the top is the ‘Recipient.’ You can choose an email list, an Entourage list, or email messages from the Apple AddressBook.

Below Recipient is the Subject. Below that are two more boxes; one for the text-only body of the email newsletter (very handy), and the other for the HTML part of the message.

Cut and paste each into the appropriate boxes. You’re almost done.

Newsletter even lets you add attachments to the newsletter, and Preview the newsletter so you know what it looks like before you send it.

IF you need extra HTML headers, there’s a button for that. That’s just about it.

Open Preferences and set your email server information, logging information. There’s even a feature to validate the recipients (to make sure they exist before sending the email), and a ‘From’ field.

If your email server requires authentication, then Newsletter handles that, too. Save and close preferences. You’re ready to send.

Optionally, if you want to ‘customize’ the emails, you can. Newsletter has a few ‘smart tags’ which let you create a personalized greeting in a ‘mail merge’ sort of way, to each recipient.

To try it out, open Newsletter and grab the Source code from any web page. Paste it into the HTML area. Then send the message to yourself. It works.

Click Here for the link to download Newsletter. Enjoy.

Summary
Newsletter works. It’s simple. Complex features are not needed. The name ‘Newsletter’ is probably a misfit. Maybe it should be called ‘Newsletter Sender’ or something like that.

Jack D. Miller
Remarkably, Alexis, Newsletter actually seems to work and I don’t know of too many (as in, ‘none’) other Mac applications which do the same thing. Good find for the Low End. Read the developer’s license. It’s funny.

Bambi Hambi
How do you manage to find these applications? Why isn’t there something quite like this already? The Newsletter ‘Help Screens’ are a bit tacky but most of the information is there. You need to add some info about how to create email address lists.