I'm going to focus on a small part of your query:

We would like a solution that will let us send out HTML emails and then monitor who opens them etc.

There are two ways to monitor who reads a message.

First we have read receipts. These are useless as the majority of email clients are configured to ignore them (or don't implement RFC 2289 (which is not yet a standard) in the first place), and the majority of clients which aren't flash up a (very annoying) dialog box to ask the user if they want to send the receipt. Thus, the technique gives such inaccurate results as to be useless.

Second, we have webbugs. This involves sticking an external image reference in an HTML formatted email with a unique tracking ID in the query string of the URI. Since most email clients block external images by default, and since people do read mail offline, the results are (again) inaccurate. It gets worse though, unique tracking IDs are a favoured technique of Evil Spammers (TM), so spam blocking software looks for the presence of webbugs and pushes the score of messages in which it finds them that bit closer to 'spam' (not that using HTML formatting in the first place helps in this regard). This makes webbugs worse then useless for such tracking.

In a nutshell you can't get good results and you can't get bad results without annoying your readers - so forget about tracking.

Oh, and as an aside, if you want mailing list software, I suggest Mailman (even though it isn't Perl).

Or to bring this more toward Perl, how about Siesta which can also be found on CPAN.

/J\

or sympa - http://www.sympa.org/

What you can do: if you have any links inside the mail, add a token to them that you can count by a script, like http://.......mycontent.pl?userid=49152
These are people who actively click on a link, i.e. they are potentially interested in your content.
People who aren't, can't and shouldn't be counted, like dorward just pointed out. You won't get the accurate number, and you're going to bother them.

As a sender of bulk mail, you should be extremely careful about what you do, otherwise you will find your company in spam filtering lists quickly. Email marketing already has a very bad reputation these days, so please be careful not to make things worse!

Lot's of good feedback here. I just wanted to contribute this link:

http://www.scriptsearch.com/Perl/Scripts_and_Programs/Mailing_List_Managers/

I found this in my travels and may help you jumpstart on this project. Many of them are free and ripe for modifying :)

thanks for the advice, I think we might end up going for an off the shelf solution, we found this http://www.arialsoftware.com/ don't know if anyone has used it, but it certainly looks like it should do the job.

cheers, Tom

>> Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open <<
- Sir James Dewar, Scientist (1877-1925)
Existem Ltd

$500 for emailing software? I think I'm doing the wrong work. I didn't think people actualy paid for that stuff ;) No Offence to you, I just realy didn't think people bought those things. /me considers producing such software....hmmm.


___________
Eric Hodges

False positives you say? Well, there was one guy who used to send HTML email I did want to keep. It was just a matter of whitelisting him - but since then, he has been enlightned (clue by fours are such useful devices) and doesn't sent HTML email anymore anyway.

I guess many people call be old-fashioned, but for me, mail is plain text ASCII, and nothing else.

It is a mailling list manager - it doesn't care about the content of the messages :-)

/J\

ah ok thats cool then, thanks