Simplenews is a Drupal module that lets you send a newsletter to registered users and non-users alike from your Drupal-powered website. It’s really quite easy to use and blends well with the rest of Drupal. The basics of Simplenews let you create multiple newsletter categories, from which you can send out regular or irregularly planned newsletters to a list of subscribers. Subscribers to a given newsletter category become such through two possible methods: they sign up from the sidebar of your site via a form which is made optionally available for each newsletter category you create; or the subscriber's email address was imported by the administrator of the site through the interface provided by Simplenews.

Development Seed recently worked with Dries Knapen from Belgium, and the original author of the Simplenews module, to further develop some of the functionality of the module. As it stands Simplenews is still a straightforward idea and easy to use but now with a few more features. Development Seed is eyeing a few more ideas with the Simplenews module in order to make it a viable alternative for sending newsletters from Drupal-powered sites for organizations that still need to build lists and track statistics, but maybe do not need to send messages to hundreds of thousands of addresses at a time.

The specific improvements and add-ons that Development Seed worked with Dries on include

* Major enhancements of the Click.module (originally authored by Khalid Baheyeldin) to better track click rates. Now you can use the Click module in combination with the Simplenews module to embed links in the newsletters you send out from your Drupal site and track-thru rates.

* A new Open Rate module which tracks the open rates of newsletters you send out with Simplenews. The Open Rate module will use a css file and/or an image file to track actual open rates and has a mechanism for improving accuracy with these methods.

* Coming soon are changes Dries is making and Development Seed is sponsoring to integrate Graphstat module - a module for making graphs of various data on a Drupal site, such as logs/stats - with the Click and Open Rate modules so you can visualize your results. Graphstat will have an exposed API and will be revamped to make its rendering capabilities much more accessible for use by other modules.

A few key elements we’d like to add to Simplenews to make it a more viable option for organizations with small to medium size lists are to:

* Make it easier to make "lists" and add/move email addresses to different lists. 

* Prevent sending more than one identical newsletter to a single email address if a person is on two "lists" and you are sending to two lists.

* When a person unsubscribes via an email sent from a "list," make sure the person is indeed unsubscribed.  But, make it easy to say "only send me emails for newsletters about Camping, and never send me newsletters about anything else" - easy opt-in/opt-out without totally turning off the user.

* Track bounce rates.

* Optionally track more than just an email address to allow for other data like name and location to be easily associated with an email in a list.

This is just a basic list of a few more things we'd like to work on with Dries to further improve Simplenews. If you would like to help sponsor some of this work, or have ideas to add to the list for consideration as improvements to the module, please drop us a line.