E-mail communication management firm L-Soft has acquired substantial assets from Maila Nordic AB, a Swedish marketing communication company, including e-mail tracking technology, the Maila Tracker software, and the company's development center in Erlangen, Germany. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

LISTSERV software, L-Soft's flagship product, manages e-mail lists and facilitates the production of personalized direct e-mail marketing campaigns. Working together, LISTSERV and LSMTP perform electronic "mail-merging" by substituting variable values that are extracted from a database inside an e-mail message template.

The result is a platform that permits the creation of highly targeted and personalized e-mail messages, capable of delivering over one million messages in one hour from a single server. Currently, LISTSERV manages the delivery of 30 million messages on an average weekday to the 100 million subscriptions of more than 165,000 LISTSERV lists worldwide.

L-Soft plans to further enhance Maila Tracker and will release it as a fully integrated add-on to its LISTSERV e-mail list manager. Originally engineered to work with L-Soft's high-performance LSMTP mail engine, the acquired tracking software, will be able to handle high-volume campaigns. The first software release is scheduled for the end of the year, but tracking services will be available to ListPlex hosting service customers this fall.

"This acquisition will make it possible for our clients to measure the success of their e-mail marketing campaigns and learn more about their customers' interests," said Eric Thomas, founder and chief executive officer of the Landover, Md.-based L-Soft. "The system can track the number of opened e-mail messages, along with click-through rates and resulting actions, such as purchases or registrations to online services."