Upgrades Speed High-Volume E-Mail

Businesses looking to communicate with customers, partners and suppliers more rapidly and more often could be in for good news from BoldFish Inc. and Lyris Technologies Inc.

Both companies are readying upgrades to their respective high-volume outbound e-mail services that will enable enterprises to send high-volume e-mail faster, more reliably and without extensive IT support.

BoldFish last week announced an upgrade to BoldFish Express Server to provide access to the BoldFish Express Network. The network is a hosted service that lets companies send up to tens of millions of messages without IT support and without transferring customer databases to an application server provider, said BoldFish officials in Santa Clara, Calif.

Other new features of Express Server 2.3, available now, include support for sending text messages to wireless devices; personalization of messages with information stored in multiple databases; and a new GUI that segments an opt-in list by demographics and buying behavior.

Also new is support for multimedia content within messages; multipart MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension); and control of marketing and other communications programs through audit trails, logging and access approval.

Cyberian Outpost Inc. is using Express Server 2.2 and plans to upgrade. The online shopping site has tested BoldFish Express Network with positive results and looks forward to using the multipart MIME capabilities, said Edee Wollin, vice president of marketing at Cyberian Outpost, of Kent, Conn.

“We would use [Express Network] when our own system is unavailable or if we need to do something on an immediate basis,” said Wollin, who was impressed with the high-speed distribution. “We will use it as a supplement on a case-by-case basis [until the upgrade to 2.3 is complete].”

Separately, Lyris, of Berkeley, Calif., is upgrading two of its list management applications, both of which are designed for electronic direct marketing, electronic publishing and online discussions.

List Manager 4.2, due next month, will have an improved GUI, new segmentation features and the ability to merge mail without duplication. List ManagerSQL 1.1, due late this month, provides scalability for managing large e-mail lists and offers database integration of those lists with Microsoft Corp.s SQL Server databases.