Alpha Software and JangoMail unveil a new data-driven, customized e-mailing system

AlphaMailer Delivers

Alpha Software and JangoMail unveil a new data-driven, customized e-mailing system that is tightly integrated into Alpha Five Version 9 to ensure that marketing and custom business communications get through, and puts total control into the hands of e-marketers

BURLINGTON, Mass.-July 1, 2008-Nobody likes spam, and no legitimate e-marketer, business, or organization wants to be accused of being a spammer. Conversely, people hate it when legitimate permission-based e-mail newsletters, appointment reminders, sales quotations, personalized offers, medical or school test results, and event notifications are blocked by anti-spam measures. For businesses, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, schools, institutions, and their customers, spam filters, blacklists, and firewalls are making legitimate e-marketing and e-mail communications increasingly unreliable.

But now there’s a new direct e-mail marketing and communications system that works hard to ensure that e-mails get through, that they’re not falsely identified as spam, and that positive client relationships are maintained. Available today though a partnership between Alpha Software and JangoMail, AlphaMailer brings data-driven, permission-based e-mail marketing and e-communications to a higher level. It is now possible for anyone-even inexperienced users-to launch very effective e-mailings that can be highly customized with data from an Alpha Five Version 9 database.

SWIFT AND RELIABLE COMPLETION OF E-MAILINGS

Comcast, AT&T Broadband, AOL, Juno, Netzero, and other leading ISPs have agreed to green-light marketing campaigns managed by AlphaMailer. AlphaMailer also maintains relationships with major independent whitelisting, accreditation, and authentication programs, such as Return Path’s Sender Score Certified Program, Habeas SafeList, and more. This means AlphaMailer messages that comply with permission e-mail standards will be approved by top ISPs, such as Microsoft, Roadrunner, and Cox; leading filtering solutions, such as Spam Assassin, IronPort Systems, Barracuda Networks, and Cloudmark; and thousands of top universities and Fortune 500 companies.

AlphaMailer also monitors DNS Blacklists (DNSBL) and Real-Time Blacklists (RBL), and automatically takes measures to protect the user’s IP addresses from being blacklisted. It supports publishing Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records, and can digitally sign messages with DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). AlphaMailer will also respond to spam complaints individually.

THE ULTIMATE FRONT-END FOR E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS

Built on the Alpha Five database system, which continues to win accolades for its ease of use and versatility in building desktop and AJAX-powered Web applications rapidly and easily, AlphaMailer provides intuitive tools for designing, composing, sending, managing, and measuring the success of e-mail campaigns, including:

· Distributed e-mail network. AlphaMailer offers “mission critical” grade reliability with e-mail servers located in eight data centers around the world. Each data center is on a different IP subnet, providing fault tolerance and redundancy.

· Instant list generation. Mailing lists can be generated at the click of a button, without the need for tedious copy and pasting. Because of Alpha Five Version 9’s powerful data linking tools, e-mail lists can be generated from text files, Excel, Access, Quickbooks, Alpha Five, or any SQL database, such as MS SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, EnterpriseDB, Postgres, and DB2.

· Total control of personalization and content customization. Any decent mailing system lets users substitute field names for values. But AlphaMailer goes further, allowing marketers to define custom content for each and every recipient, based on their personal profile in an Alpha Five database. E-mails can also be programmed to dynamically generate content in real time, allowing different experiences based on when recipients receive, open, and read their messages.

· Extremely feature-rich HTML editor for composing e-mail campaigns. The editor supports cascading style sheets, background colors, anchors, and scrolling links; and makes it easy to automate content-related tasks. It also has buttons to help make sure that e-mails are compliant with the CAN-SPAM law. The editor works on any Java-enabled browser on any operating system, and lets you use 100 percent of your screen space to write and design your e-mailings. Real-time spell checking is supported. Images are preserved when copy and pasting from a Web site, and a “fix image” button in the editor will automatically fix images by converting relative image references to absolute image references. When you copy and paste Word documents, the editor will offer to “clean” the HTML that is created by MS Word. The editor lets you pre-save customized “chunks” of content for easy insertion at any time. The editor also has one-click buttons to automatically include working “unsubscribe” statements with a link, “forward to a friend” statements with a link, and “view as a Web page” statement with a link.

· Total control of branding. Unlike other solutions, AlphaMailer never adds taglines, footers, logos, advertisements, or other content to your outbound e-mails. Users have full control over every aspect of their e-mail designs, which is crucial for branding, bonding, personalization, and clarity of communications. This includes the size and location of logos, headlines, body copy, unsubscribe links, and tracking domains.

· Total control of message properties. In addition to the usual suspects-defining subjects, messages, and recipients-AlphaMailer lets users request return receipts, set priority, establish line length for wrapping, define content transfer encoding, select the character set (including all ISO formats), insert a different reply-to address, and attach up to 20 files.

· Total control of tracking. AlphaMailer tracks and reports how many messages are opened, bounced, replied to, forwarded, unsubscribed, and clicked-through on a per-campaign basis. It can even track an e-mail recipient’s movement through a company’s Web site, blog, or landing page after they click a call-to-action link.

· Foreign language support. AlphaMailer speaks your language, whether it’s French, German, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or English-whatever. All foreign languages and double-byte character sets are supported in both plain-text and HTML modes.

· 24-hour support. Emergency support is available to all customers around the clock, in the rare event something doesn’t operate as expected, or the user simply has a question to ask.

· Personalized attachments. Add attachments to AlphaMailer with the click of a mouse. Need to send a different attachment to each recipient? You can send personalized attachments too!

· SPAM trigger evaluator. With one click, you can check your outgoing message and have it scored for spam potential. AlphaMailer even makes suggestions on how to improve your score and reduce the likelihood that your message will be blocked.

· Professionally designed templates. Not an artist? Not a problem. AlphaMailer includes dozens of professionally designed e-mail templates ready for your use.

· Unsubscribe and bounce handler. AlphaMailer automatically records “unsubscribe” responses to messages from your account. Even if you try, AlphaMailer will not send to these addresses again. AlphaMailer also records any addresses that bounce back as undeliverable. AlphaMailer remembers and won’t send these out either!

· Automatic follow-up e-mails. AlphaMailer also lets you send automated follow-up e-mail messages to your recipients who have taken a particular action on a past e-mail message. You can set up such an automated follow-up e-mail when a recipient clicks a link, opens an e-mail message, or visits a page on your Web site. Launching a new product? Send a coupon to folks who click a link to the product’s page. For example, use triggers in AlphaMailer to send a personalized thank you e-mail immediately to a visitor who lands on the purchase completion page of your Web site.

“Personalized permission-based e-mails, targeted e-mail information distribution, marketing, and newsletters are some of the easiest ways to build lasting relationships and loyalty with customers,” says Richard Rabins, Co-chairman of Alpha Software. “They’re also some of the easiest ways to break that relationship. If your mail doesn’t get through, or if you’re identified as a spammer, that’s the end of your communication with customers. And that’s the end of your investment. Of all marketing media outreaches, e-mail delivers the most ROI by a wide margin, but only if it’s delivered. And AlphaMailer delivers.”

AlphaMailer is available now. A free trial account that allows users to send up to 50 e-mails is available at http://www.alphasoftware.com/alphafive/alphamailer/#html. Pricing starts at $30 per month.

ABOUT ALPHA SOFTWARE INC.

Since 1982, Alpha Software has been providing developers with award-winning tools that make it easy to rapidly build robust database and business applications. Today over 1 million developers rely on Alpha Software’s flagship platform, Alpha Five, to build desktop, client-server, distributed, Web 2.0, and AJAX applications for organizations of any size-from SOHO to the Fortune 100. Every day, tens of millions of people and businesses rely on applications built in Alpha Five. With the introduction of Alpha Five Version 9 Platinum Edition in 2008, Alpha Software set new standards for speed of development, portability, reporting, and security for database applications of all stripes. The company is privately held, and based in Burlington, Mass. Alpha Software can be found on the Web at http://www.alphasoftware.com.

ABOUT JANGOMAIL

JangoMail is an industry leader in permission-based e-mail marketing. More than 1,400 organizations on six of the seven continents rely on JangoMail to send personalized, targeted e-mails to their customers and prospects.

PRESS RESOURCES

Press/blogger contact:

Kate Ritchie

610-642-8253, ext. 162

484-557-5518

KateR {at} GregoryFCA(.)com

Alpha Five Platinum microsite:

http://www.AlphaSoftware.com/AlphaFive/Platinum/index.asp

Alpha Software blog:

http://Blog.AlphaSoftware.com

Alpha Software home page:

http://www.AlphaSoftware.com

Press contact: KateR {at} GregoryFCA(.)com

Company contact: Richard {at} AlphaSoftware(.)com