Customer Relationship Management, Autoresponders and Forums

Hi Guys!

I've been away from the forum for a while, but I promise I've been working hard!

I'm currently putting together a forum, and I'm trying to work out how to manage sign-ups with email autoresponders.

So far, it seems that vBulletin is the best forum software for my needs (it's what we're using now), and aWeber seems to be the most popular autoresponder.

My questions relate to how to integrate both of these (or whatever you think would work best) so that I can effectively manage my customer base?

I'd also like to be able to segregate my email list auto-magic-ally so I need to be able to access data about which actions (such as buying products, visiting links, becoming members) they have taken and which they have not.

I've looked at the popular autoresponders (such as aWeber, GetResponse and iContact) but these do not seem to have the ability to segregate the lists in the ways I'd like.

I've looked into free customer relationship management solutions, such as SugarCRM, which offers email broadcasts but not autoresponder functionality.

I've also looked into some free forum solutions (such as SMF and wordpress plugins) but these seem to fill with spam so quickly.

How do you manage your customer base and segregate your list so that you can email most effectively?

Thanks for sharing your wisdom,

Adam