Email marketing tools are a popular way of promoting businesses, providing exclusive information to a customer base, and alerting the public of new services and products. No one receives these mailings unless they have asked to be included on the mailing lists. Spam just spits out random missives that may or may not include dangerous computer viruses.

There are paid service versions of email platforms available, where companies pay firms a subscription fee to mail any newsletters and promotions to that company’s mailing lists. Open source refers to those packages available to the public for use without a fee. Below are the most popular versions available for download on the Internet today.

1. PHPList

As email marketing tools go, this platform is one of the most popular. Since its launch, this software download garners more than 10,000 new users every month, because it promotes itself as the perfect one-way email announcement system for newsletter and publicity launches. It can manage lists of more than 100,000 subscribers, it quickly detects and removes duplicates, and provides a tracking system so that users can tell who is opening their messages and who is just deleting them. Unlike a lot of the paid systems, it allows users to add attachments, and an email to fax version is in the offing.

2. Mailman

Mailman is used primarily for producing and managing emails. Just like the paid services, Mailman also archives messages, reports on delivery rates and will deal with bounces and spam filters effectively. Its unique platform makes it easy to scale for handling larger mailing lists, and is integrated to work on message boards systems and UNIX-based systems.

3. PoMMo

This platform is downloadable but is managed through a web-based interface. It includes coding so that users can subscribe to mailing lists through a dedicated website, as well as managing standalone lists. It will also allow senders to filter and segment mailing lists, setting up parameters for splitting up deliveries from much longer lists for quicker and more targeted deliveries.

4. Dada Mail

This one does everything the others will, but is also built so that it can be easily integrated with the user’s web hosting account. It is easy to use, and can be set up so that messages can also be sent through RSS feeds and Twitter, and the archives created can be left open for public view.

5. OpenEMM

This is one of the oldest and most sophisticated platforms available for free. In addition to all of the services offered by its competitors, it also offers transaction and time triggered emails, content management, and pre-written scripts for use. This system will run well on both Windows and Linux operating systems.