In part one of the email marketing series, I discussed how email marketing can improve your customer relationships and promote sales. I also talked about the different types of email marketing, and the advantages of building an opt-in list. In part two, I discussed a few reason why you should choose a third party email marketing website instead of mass-mailing yourself and then reviewed some of the more popular email marketing websites out there. In this article I’ll be reviewing a few more options, including MadMimi, Aweber, Benchmark, iContact, and CampaignMonitor.
MadMimi (Free for less than 100 subscribers, as low as $8 per month)
The appeal of MadMimi is apparent right from the start: the website is bright, the layout is simple and intuitive, and setting up an account is easy and requires no credit card for the free account type. Users who are unfamiliar with email marketing will enjoy the extensive theme and template selection, phone and email support, and the helpful video tutorial that guides you through creating your first email campaign using MadMimi’s module-based, WYSIWYG message editor/composer. Import your mailing list, confirm your email address, and you’re ready to send out your first campaign.
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Email has been around for a few decades and in the last decade it hasn’t changed very much from its original structure. The nature of email is that it’s a person-to-person communication, which serves most users just fine, except when trying to communicate between a group. Email messages pile up and it becomes difficult to figure out who communicated what message and when. In that case what you really need is more akin to a digital bulletin board or, as the tech industry has begun to call it within the last few years, a collaborative workspace.
Email is not the secure communication medium that most people take it for. Even if you’re using HTTPS or SSL to access your email account, after your message leaves your mail server it travels across the internet as relatively plain text until it reaches the intended recipient. During that journey, your message can be read or tampered with by cyber-criminals, government agencies, your ISP, unscrupulous network administrators, or anybody with some network knowledge and packet-sniffing software. Think of it more as sending a postcard through the mail, rather than a sealed envelope.
Before I dive into threadsy’s details, let’s first cover the basics. threadsy is a web-based communication aggregator. It allows you to aggregate your emails and social networks into one common bucket. The basic idea is that communication is all the same, it doesn’t matter if it’s an email, a Facebook message or a direct message on Twitter. threadsy allows you to communicate using all these different platforms seamlessly. At this point, treadsy supports, Email (AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and normal IMAP), Facebook and Twitter. threadsy is still in private beta, but we’re giving away 20 invites! 
The casual observer may simply write off Postbox as being another in a long line of hopeful desktop email client replacements, but there’s more to this powerful email client than meets the eye. A familiar layout, a bevy of smartly integrated features, reliable performance, plug-in support make Postbox a dream-come-true for anyone who relies heavily on their inbox to keep their business and personal lives organized.
Xobni
The iPhone was launched without the capability to search emails. It took until iPhone OS 3.0 for this feature to be introduced. Unfortunately, the search feature is still limited to the headers (i.e. to, from, subject etc). You are not able to search the body of the messages (full-text search). This is a quite severe limitation, in particular for mobile business users.