If you are a Web developer or you’ve ever tried sending an email to a list of people, you know it can be quite difficult to pull off. It’s annoying because you have to make sure your message will be readable on a multitude of email clients, that it won’t be considered SPAM and that accents (if you’re writing in a language that uses them) will work. Character encoding is always such a troublesome thing to manage.

MaxBulk Mailer Pro version 6 is a piece of software that works on both Mac OS X and Windows that will help you send such an email. The software is quite powerful— it gives you guidance to make sure your mail is not considered SPAM, it can import a list of recipients from a multitude of sources (including a remote database system, a text file, CSV file, etc.) and it will work with whatever SMTP server you want (you can configure this when sending the mail). The software allows you to save lists of contact for future reuse and you can export that list to a text file if you’d like to move the list to another database.

The Pro version of the software also allows you to send mail attachments. Considering the small price difference, it can be worth it to go for the Pro version. The normal edition retails for $49 US while the Pro is $10 more at $59.

All’s not perfect though. The interface to write the email itself could use an overhaul. It’s not wysiwyg at all, it’s a simple text box where you paste whatever you want to send. If you are sending an HTML email, you have to type the HTML tags yourself. During our tests, we had some difficulties with text/html combo emails which for some reason Apple Mail wasn’t too keen on. It worked on a second test however…

While it’s not perfect by any means, it is quite a nice little piece of software and seems to work pretty well. The “new”-ish version 6.0 is a nice upgrade if you had version 5 before. Other than new features, the interface has been revamped a bit. Clearly, the next step for MaxBulk Mailer is to improve on the text editing widget since the rest of the package feels polished and feature complete.

You can try a free 30 days demo on their web site if you’d like to see how it works.