If you just send a lot of ordinary emails, you can skip this. If you're in a company that already has designers in-house crafting gorgeous and on-message email newsletter designs, you can skip this. If you're in the middle, though, such as a small company sending out newsletters or HTML updates to a few thousand people, or even just the newsletter editor for a club with a few dozen scattered members,
Mail Designer 2 and
Mail Designer Pro 2 are worth looking at.
Both Mail Designer 2 and Mail Designer Pro 2 work by having you first determine what your email newsletter should look like. They come with very drag-and-droppable adjustments to add in boxes where your text will go, boxes where the images and the graphics will be. You can base your work on existing templates, or start from a very basic one and build up to what you like.
The editing process where you lay out your various email elements is familiar if you've ever used a page layout program; it's even reminiscent of Apple's long-discarded iWeb. There are many provided templates, and many more that you can buy from the manufacturer -- but also more still that you can buy from third-party artists and designers.
Once you've designed the email and written it, you then have the choice of sending these emails direct from Mail Designer or via Apple Mail. Choose Apple Mail each time. Mail Designer 2 can use your Contact list -- that's how it is able to address emails directly should you want that -- but it doesn't recognize groups. So you could just type and add everybody one by one each time, or you could pass this to Apple Mail, where you can have pre-set groups that you use.
Either way, you're not going to send directly or via Apple Mail to thousands of people, because no consumer-level email provider is going to let you due to rules about spamming (even if everyone you're sending to wants to receive your post). We'd like to see Mail Designer include some serious tools for managing email lists, but you are able to create your designs here and send them to services such as
MailChimp and
Campaign Monitor, which exist to let you email dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people.
If you've done any mass email newsletters in the last couple of years, then you've probably come across MailChimp. It's an online service for creating these fancy emails, and then sending them out to particular lists of users that you maintain. MailChimp is a good service, easy to use, and is free up to a certain number of recipients. If you're writing a parish newsletter or maybe a regional union one, there's a strong chance you'll never need to pay for MailChimp.
So it's great that the service is usable in conjunction with Mail Designer. Create your design on the Mac, send it off to the service, and thereafter you can call up that design as a recently-sent campaign and re-use it. It could be a smoother transaction, though, as the first time you do it Mail Designer explains you need to get the API key from the service and enter it. It shows you how, but it's an extra step that wouldn't be necessary if Mail Designer could handle the distribution of emails itself.
It's not an easy job managing thousands or hundreds of thousands of emails on a list, but if you're using MailChimp or Campaign Monitor to do the job of sending, we'd be thinking about using them for the design part too -- but with online services or apps like MailChimp, you are fairly limited to the templates provided. You can change a lot, but basic structure will be the same and whatever indefinable limit that is, it is still the case that when someone sends you an email newsletter, you know it came via MailChimp (particularly as they add "powered by MailChimp" to the bottom). You can see a certain style, a certain layout.
Mail Designer 2 has its own templates, and they will be less common than online ones, so you will look distinctive -- and that could be enough for you. With their general ease of designing a new email newsletter, too, these apps are useful. The primary differences between the two versions, by the way, are that the Pro one is aimed at newsletters which will also be read on phones and tablets.
Mail Designer 2 requires OS X 10.7 or later, and is
on the Mac App Store for $30. Mail Designer 2 Pro is also
on the Mac App Store and at time of review is part of a
"Get Productive" sale for half off its usual price, making it $25. Yes, cheaper than the regular, and a good deal at twice the price.
Who is Mail Designer 2 for:
Perhaps round-robin writers, but really anyone sending out newsletters and updates via email to a fairly large number of people.
Who is Mail Designer 2 not for:
Happy MailChimp users, or companies that already have designers working on this stuff.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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