I'm looking to buy some autoresponder/email marketing software for our
business and want to make a good choice. I have spent about a week
searching online for what's available and have narrowed it down to
four software packages to decide on. However now I need some help in
checking that I haven't missed equally good or better software.

To assist, I have my own short list of 4 autoresponders that another
Google Answers researcher is comparing feature-for-feature. So what
I'm after here is further research done to try and find better
software than these 4 in my short list.

My Short list
1. Promosoft Autoresponder (Personal version) at www.autoreplying.com 
2. Autoresponse Plus at www.autoresponseplus.com 
3. Gammadyne at www.gammadyne.com/mmail.htm (which also works with CP-Report below)
4. Customer Paradigm (Email Builder and CP-Report together) at
www.customerparadigm.com

The outcome I'd like is no more than 5-10 alternatives found but that
they be the best/high quality (see my short list as a guide to the
quality required). "Low volume of alternatives that are high quality
alternatives" is the key factor.

Criteria to help you search:

1. Software should have a comprehensive set of features as per my
short list examples (so essentially you?re looking for anything that
does the same or more as my short list for either the same or similar
price) - a few hundred dollars either way is no problem.

2. The software should have these three components in the package
-- autoresponder functionality
-- email newsletter marketing/ subscriber list management
-- email newsletter design functionality (ie; allows HTML formatting,
testing, etc and designing of newsletters to be sent to subscribers)

3. Software criteria to avoid:
-- avoid software that costs less than USD$100 or more than USD$1000
-- charges a monthly fee of any kind (I want single one-off cost packages)

I'm willing to tip well for very good work. Thanks.