In GroupMail we bundle a number of templates to help get you started or if you prefer the DIY approach can roll your own using the inbuilt editor or your favourite HTML editor.

The guys in Toddle offer another option to help with your HTML messages. Signup couldn’t be simpler, just enter an email address, then choose from 8 template designs and customize them for your needs with the browser based editor.

Check out the video to see it in action.

Once you’re finished with the content, pressing send will open the message you have just created in the GroupMail editor and from there you can send your bulk email campaign as normal in GroupMail.

You can also use the import feature in GroupMail to get the saved message from Toddle, they’ve been good enough to describe this process here.

Check out Toddle for yourself, it seems like a really useful tool to help get you started with your HTML email design.

• You can create a message in GroupMail’s own WYSIWYG HTML message editor.
• You can use one of our professionally designed and tested HTML email templates
• You can import an HTML email design that you designed externally and save it as a user-generated template.
• You can even import a web page into the body of your email, with all links active (Just open a blank message and click File/Import/Web Page)

We don’t recommend using Microsoft Word or Publisher to create your message as there is particular HTML formatting used in Word and Publisher that does not render properly in email clients other than Outlook or Outlook Express.

So the sky’s the limit, really.

Feel free to share your favorite HTML email designs with us if you want to showcase them on our blog. We love inspiration!

GroupMail rated 8.3 Excellent

Happy to see Service & support getting a high score, it’s something we put a lot of time and effort into.

There were a number of areas in GroupMail they highlighted as “could do better” (a favourite teacher comment on my school report cards from the past) – in summary

GroupMail isn’t the prettiest Windows application, but the interface is clean and uncluttered …

The user interface has not had a facelift since the release of Windows XP so I guess it does look a bit dated, it’s not in our immediate plans to update this, making the interface even cleaner, less cluttered and more useable is probably a higher priority from the feedback we’re getting.

GroupMail Business Edition provides 20 HTML templates. They’re basic …

Email templates are something we are working on, all going well we should have a fresh batch of new design templates available with the next release – here is a sneak preview to the fruits of Ryan’s work to date (he was also good enough to make some of his own photos available for use)

GroupMail Email Templates

The only niggle was that GroupMail introduced redundant column data that wasn’t in our Outlook database; it also renamed column fields — for instance, ‘Web site’ in Outlook was renamed to ‘Business home page’ in GroupMail, and ‘Mobile phone’ was Americanised to ‘Cellphone’.

Microsoft Outlook is good enough to not show those ID columns to the user, GroupMail should do the same, we are planning to do some further address book integration work with GroupMail in the next couple of weeks, should be able to make those unsightly columns disappear too.
On the Americanised terms -or is it Americanized ? despite GroupMail being born and brought up in Ireland, historically we have tended to go with US English by default (as its our biggest market). Now that GroupMail is available in a variety of languages, it would be pretty straight forward to offer both US and UK English options – would it be ironic if one of our 2 American team members offered to do the translation ? Go on Tom or Ryan you know you want to

Anyhow, ZDNet UK editor’s overall verdict:

GroupMail is good value for businesses of all sizes. The software isn’t exactly pretty, but its interface is clean and, above all, presents all the essential features. GroupMail allows you to create newsletters, while its impressive list handling handles issues like subscribe/unsubscribe, removals, bounced email address deletion and so on.

Cheers guys for taking the time to check out our product, it’s always interesting for us to see it from a fresh/non-biased perspective, check out the full review here.