Hi,
yes, we've found a brilliant piece of software called oemPro from
octeth. This offers all you need in professional opt-in permission based marketing. From automated bounce management, multiple mailing list that can become REALLY large at no problem, mail send throttleing, a "member area" where recipients can adjust their mailing preferences, which list they are subscribed to, deletion of their data, to a real nice templating system for HTML newsletters, making it so easy to send out campaigns, including one click opt-out links, one click membership area links, absolute perfect link and click logging, so you always know, WHO has clicked WHERE in your newsletter, a great statistic section and so forth. So for professional grade mailings, this is perfect and the price at around 300 $ or so is okay for it.
We have a test installation, a site that is not in use currently but runs on Mambo and has oemPro seamlessly integrated into the site:
http://www.feinerlei.de - this was just a little experiment, but feel free to have a look around. The site is in German but it will propably be rather self explanatory, anyway. If you can help you with anything further, just drop me a line at
panatlantica@googlemail.com.
Apart from that, we have - like some others - however switched from Mambo as our CMS of choice to Drupal. Drupal has some nice newsletter-modules, that are somewhat similar to those of Mambo, however, offer some more control over what you are doing. Also, as typical for Drupal, they integrated much more seamlessly into the entire CMS then is currently possible with Mambo. Although Mambo offers the possibility to have components and modules "plug in" to the system, a component or module must basically be programmed from scratch and there are no real guidlines on the user interface or API of how to programm a Mambo component/module. With Drupal, there are so called "hooks" in nearly all system calls of the core. This is nice because, you can simply hook into those hooks at any given moment overriding standard procedures and diverting them to your own procedure. At the same time, Drupal offers a great toolkit of user interface and system functions which means you can use A LOT of core libraries for your own development with no need to really start from scratch. This has some advantages, mainly in useability: Drupal modules are therefore much tighter integrated with Drupal and they are just so easy to use because they feel and function like anything else in Drupal.
I guess, the concept of hooks and a stronger guidline on how to programme and especially design the user interface of Mambo components / modules could help Mambo - or Joomla - a lot and are definitively worth having a look upon.
Steve.
