Of course, when you're talking about software, nothing is ever completely perfect and the new features added for a later version often have their own rough edges that will need to be cleaned up in yet more subsequent updates. The difference is that by the time a product reaches the ripe, old age of 3.0, the fundamentals are all in place. By this time, the developers really do know how to "do" the product's core capability.

And so, it's with that feeling of comfort you get when putting on a favorite sweater that I started to dig into TemplateZone's High Impact Email 3.0 product. The purpose of High Impact Email is to help you create, well, high-impact email messages. High Impact Email provides a wide range of HTML email message templates and helps you send out attractive HTML newsletters like the one shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

Here's an actual newsletter sent out from High Impact Email 3.0. Click picture for a larger image.

What sets High Impact Email apart is the large template library, which includes the following categories:

• Advertising
• Business Announcements
• Business Forms
• Business Invitations
• Business Meeting
• Calendars
• Catalogs
• Greetings Holiday Greetings
• Memos and Correspondence
• Newsletters
• Outlook Apply Templates (For Outlook Only)
• Personal Invitations
• Photo Frames
• Price Lists
• Stationery (Letterhead)

You don't need to know HTML nor do you need to have any design skill. All you need to do is choose from a template you like, add your own text, and send off the message. Figure B shows another example high-impact email message, this one a simple piece of stationary.

FIGURE B

You can make your own, attractive stationary. Click picture for a larger image.

High Impact Email 3.0 comes in two editions, Basic and Professional. The Basic edition, priced at $49.95 comes with 425 templates while the Professional edition, priced at $99.95 has 784. The Professional edition also adds a variety of list management features including mail merge, personalization, and contact import. Figure C shows a chart we lifted from TemplateZone's Web site that shows the differences between the editions.