Manage your mailings with OpenEMM

If you’re a small to medium-sized business, it behooves you to keep in touch with your customers and potential customers. An e-mail marketing application like OpenEMM can help by letting you send out any kind of e-mailings, including newsletters and service messages (transaction messages and event- or time-triggered messages). OpenEMM offers targeting, bounce management, link tracking, realtime statistics, a content management extension, and a scripting feature.

German developer Martin Aschoff, who maintains OpenEMM, say the project was designed in 2005 as a single-server version of his company’s E-Marketing Manager software. “Since we focused on big companies at that time we decided to make OpenEMM open source to quickly find international users (who might later buy commercial services from us) and to get input for development from all over the world. We launched OpenEMM on SourceForge.net in July 2006. The fast adoption of OpenEMM in more than 80 countries worldwide validated this decision.”

Aschoff says that compared to alternatives such as phplist and Dada Mail, OpenEMM is stronger in usability (GUI, graphical realtime statistics, online update) and number of features. However, unlike those alternatives, “OpenEMM is not a simple script but needs Java and a servlet engine (which is embedded in OpenEMM) to run. OpenEMM is written mainly in Java (we use Eclipse for development) and is based on the Java frameworks Spring, Struts, and Hibernate for maximum stability and scalability.” That robust foundation allows even large companies to take advantage of OpenEMM. “The biggest user we know of has a mailing list of 3.5 million names and sends out about 20 million messages a month,” Aschoff says.

Aschoff advises new users read the comprehensive 272-page user manual. The project also offers an install guide that should help users improve OpenEMM performance, and support forums with a wealth of hints and tricks from the community, including ready-to-use scripts to extend the software’s functionality.

The project is still growing and improving. The next version is scheduled for late summer with a lot of new features, and replaces the internal servlet engine Resin with Tomcat, at the request of third-party developers. Aschoff says the project usually makes two major releases per year, with some smaller bug-fix releases in between. He also welcomes contributors. “We now have contributors from all continents except for Australia (wink!).”

Seeks delivers new search engine paradigm

Google rules the search engine roost today, but upstarts always have their sights (and their sites) set on a share of its success. Seeks, for instance, introduces a new breed of social search engine in which users can collaborate and share their experiences in finding results, instead of keeping that information in the hands of a search engine provider.

How will it work? Roughly, Seeks will automatically group users who perform similar queries on traditional search engines into “search groups” with underlying common interests. Within search groups, Seeks enables collaborative filtering and community ranking of the search results, and direct publishing and recommendation of URIs. Direct publishing to search groups bypasses the traditional search engines’ need for crawlers, allowing information to be directly proposed to search group users. “We believe this is a fair and transparent new model for collaborative web search, as opposed to the black boxes of traditional search engines,” says the project’s lead developer, Emmanuel Benazera.

Seeks also emphasizes privacy and security. In its distributed P2P system, personal information always remains on each user’s machine unless explicitly revealed by the user. All shared queries on the Seeks network are encrypted based on a mathematical framework called locality-sensitive hashing, and remain so even when users are regrouped.

At least that’s the plan. In the current versions of Seeks the collaborative search feature is not yet activated. As of today users get a deployable, customizable open source meta-search engines that aggregates results from several traditional search engines. It’s what Benazera calls “the consensus of machines,” to which the project plans to add “the consensus of users” via a P2P overlay network with similarity analysis for the automatic building of search groups. “We expect to release the first usable version of this branch in a few months,” he says.

Seeks can be installed locally on individuals’ machines, or set up on search nodes for remote use by casual users. The project provides a list of public nodes that are administered by volunteers.

Benazera says the impetus to develop Seeks comes from a frustration with the current state of web search. “Typically, the Web in particular and information flows in general are moving toward a more social and crowd-controlled model, through social networks and other tools. Web search is left behind, with millions (if not billions) of users performing the same millions of queries every day around the globe, with no interaction at all. The business model of traditional search engines is ill-suited to social or collaborative search. If users were allowed to share their queries and form search groups, advertisers could contact them without going through the query retention platforms that traditional search engines are today. For this reason, existing engines will never let users collaborate on search results.”

Seeks has a long and bumpy history. Benazera says the project began around 2005, but got put on hold when the founders thought the then-new Wikia project would do a similar job. It didn’t, so Benazera ramped up development again in September 2009, and released the first version of Seeks in January of this year.

Seeks is written mostly in C++, with some portions in C, in order to produce efficient software, Benazera says. “Search engines need to be fast, so any extra latency induced by the language is not acceptable. Most development is very low-level, so we use the main OSS dev tools, such as autotools, gcc, and make.”

Because sharing is such a basic part of Seeks’ philosophy, the project has been open source software from day one. Benazera says, “Since social web search breaks the business model of traditional engines, it is our belief that the OSS community offers more alternatives, such as funding through services, etc. We are committed to build a fair, transparent engine, moving away from the search engine black boxes available today. OSS naturally offers this, through open code (i.e. rating equations are in the clear, etc.). And the OSS community supports a set of legal licenses that are suited to the information age. Typically Seeks is released under Affero GPLv3 in order to enforce the legal use of OSS in networked applications.”

If the project sounds intriguing, you can get involved. Benazera says the project needs help with core C++/C development of the distributed hashtable layer for the P2P net, with web development for the in-browser user interface, with development of plugins to enhance the search experience (adding searches on images, maps, tweets, code, and other items), and with P2P exchanges such as online chat and search result snippet tagging.

Ultimate Edition gives SourceForge the ultimate compliment

Without question Ubuntu is a great Linux distribution, but is it the ultimate OS? Nominally that title has to go to Ultimate Edition, an Ubuntu remix designed for both new Linux users and experienced sophisticates.

Developer Glenn “TheeMahn” Cady created the antecedent to Ultimate Edition in 2006, a version of Ubuntu with a Christmas theme that he called Ubuntu Christmas Edition. Its successor, Ubuntu Ultimate, drew an e-mail from Canonical, the organization behind Ubuntu, asking Cady not to use the Ubuntu name or logo because of trademark issues, so he changed the name to Ultimate Edition. Over time the distribution has grown in scope and power. While it caters to new users, it also bundles powerful tools for programming, as well as software called Ultamatix that allows users to easily install additional software and games.

Though Ultimate Edition releases are built based on twice-yearly stable releases of Ubuntu, Cady says the distro doesn’t blindly follow Ubuntu’s release schedule. “I strive for perfection, so users will get new versions when I and my admins and beta testers feel they are ready. All even-numbered releases are GNOME-based only, while odd release, such as 2.7, which came out this month, have GNOME, LXDE, KDE, Xfce, and Openbox. We also create a Gamers Edition.”

What makes Ultimate Edition so great? “One of the things I have tried to address,” Cady says, “is wireless issues – a showstopper for most laptop users. Software is another issue. I have been accused of bloating the OS because I include more than one application in different areas, such as having two or three music players. Some people call it bloat; I call it choice.”

SourceForge was a welcome answer to the project’s hosting issues. “Ultimate Edition has changed hosting services many times over the years,” Cady says. “Not long ago we had settled on a cloud of six 1Gbps servers to meet the users’ demands, mirroring across many other servers, only to be shut down again and again. In November 2009 we saw roughly half a petabyte of traffic and were shut down three times. One of my admins suggested SourceForge. It was the wisest decision I have ever made, and never have I looked back. I cannot thank you guys enough.”

As for the future, the project is considering creating a version of Ultimate Edition for the PS/3 and a Lite Edition for computers with low resources. The admins are also discussing opening beta testing of new versions to a wider swath of users.