Sending Options

Sending options are those concerned the sending out of emails.

The most important is whether they send out using sendmail or SMTP.

Sendmail may not be allowed on some servers, so you may have to rely on SMTP to send out your emails. So you must check and make sure they provide this option.

Another very important feature is the ability to do newsletter broadcast. This may be the primary reason why you are looking for an autoresponder in the first place.

Again, surprisingly, not all autoresponders have this features. Even if they have this feature, they put some restrictions on its usage. So it is worthwhile to check on this feature alone.

Other features only found in more sophisticated models include:

• Ability to do sending via multiple concurrent processes. This is important if your mailing list is very long.

• Ability to do test sending to determine the speeding speed, etc.

• Sending with or without CRON. This feature is important for locally-hosted autoresponders as not all servers allow CRON jobs. (All CRON job is required if you want to activate your script say every half an hour to check for subscribers or to send out autoresponder messages. To do sending without a CRON job, you may have to put a 1-pixel link on one of your popular webpages, so that a click by visitor will trigger the link and activate your script.)