Compass Designs .net

Anjel

www.schmalls.com

Pros
Almost a complete feature set and some attempt at integration with the Joomla user database.
Cons
Serious questions about support and updates.

Features: 4 stars
Interface: 4 stars
Overall: 3 stars (*support)

Anjel has a solid feature set, including the important functions of statistics and multiple lists. The interface is can be difficult to understand at times, but it is a sophisticated component with more to do, so that's understandable. One serious concern is support. There have been no updates in the project since 2005 and several critical bugs have emerged with the release of the 1.0.8+ versions of Joomla.

• Reliable sending mechanism
  There don't seem to be any known issues related to sending emails from Anjel. There does not seem to be anyway to resume a failed sending. Once you send, there is no progress monitor.
• Ability to throttle sending
  When you send an email, you can set how many you need to send out at once as well as set a time delay to pause between batches. There is also a handy feature to require some sort of user input from the admin.
• Unsubscribe mechanism
  All emails have an unsubscribe automatically added to the email as a footer.
• Subscribe form
  The subscribe form module works well, its a one step process. This is always better as more steps lead to abandonment. However, it only asks for your email and not your name. Setting did exist in the module parameters to add the name field, but these did not seem to have any effect.
• Double opt in
  Anjel has a simple, but effective double opt in process. It also allows you to send emails to people that have yet to confirm (one should not do this though)
• Multiple lists
  You can have as many lists as you need with Anjel. Each one can be subscribed to individually. You can even customize subscribe/opt in messages for each list.
• Bounce handling
  Anjel does not have any bounce processing.
• HTML templating
  Emails can be created with html and a text only version provided.
• Import/Export subscribers
  Anjel allows importing from csv files, and allows exporting to csv. There is no visible process to handle duplicates.
• Integration into Joomla user database
  The integration with the Joomla user db is a bit clumsy. It seems that for any newsletter, Anjel will maintain two lists, one for subscribers that are registered on the site and one for subscribers that are unregistered. It was quite easy to register on the site, and then subscribe to the email newsletter. I then sent a test email and got two copies, as I was on both lists. The unsubscription is handled independently. This means that if someone unsubscribes from your list, you might re-add them as they would still be part of the user database. This can quickly lead to conflicts with the CAN-SPAM act.
• Email Statistics
  Anjel allows you to track simple statistics about how many emails were opened.