Interspire Email Marketer review - my experience: best to avoid it!

For anyone looking for a decent newsletter application...

Interspire's Email Marketer php/mysql based app is full of bugs. It has a very impressive feature list, majority of functions apparently works... but this is just the surface. On the background you get bad / incomplete reports, wrong segmentation, serious errors when sending email, screwed-up templates, etc. This is a big mess, a piece of junk - all for 500 USD.

They require a yearly 250 USD support renewal, which is ridiculous, as the app does not work properly. You can send out simple newsletters, but once you'd use the advanced features (segmentation, advanced templates, survey, etc) it fails, works with lots of errors.

If it were a very good app and I were a pleased user, I'd go for the maintenance, but 1. I hate being a beta tester of a 500 USD app and always requesting support 2. hate paying so-called 250 "maintenance fee" annually for ironing out bugs that are in the software. They should remove it without any notice.

What happens when you pay 250 USD maintenance feel? A technician logs-in to your server, hack the code to make it work at your copy of Email Marketer - this method was applied several times, and however the quick fix works, this seems to be very unprofessional and the updates are very rare.

Even if it is more pricey, all I can recommend to go with the established email service providers who charge you a monthly cost, but that works.

Baci