Re: [SAGE] politely sending emails to huge lists of recipients

[Marco Marongiu <brontolinux@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello and thanks to you all.

Form the answers I got, and a few ones in particular, I think the
question wasn't properly stated, so I am going to try again and better
explain.

I also summarized on answer, you'll find the summary below.


$EMPLOYER has a few people that, from time to time, send batches of
emails to list of people on behalf of $CUSTOMER (an "internal"
customer). A very few of these lists are almost constant (let's say: ~10
changes per year), many others are big one-shot lists (even ~1000
addresses).

So, mailing lists manager would apply only for the mailing lists, but
I'm not so keen on letting them manage the "variable" lists (I don't
want to do it for them, and I know they could mess the things up if I
"gave away the key" to them). So... no mailman and such tools (David N.
B-E, see summary below).


I've discussed with $CUSTOMER if it was possible to use an external
service, and it's not (see the summary below) even if the price for the
service is reasonable. They want $EMPLOYER to manage it all, so I see
only two possibilities:

1) using a specific tool to do the mass mailing in an intelligent way
(e.g.: divide the recipients list in smaller batches, maximizing the
number of MXes to contact per batch; send the batch; wait for a longer
time than a common SMTP server would, send a second batch and so on).

2) configure a dedicated postfix SMTP-OUT server with a custom queue
configuration to mimic the process described in 1) as close as possible.


I am particularly interested in 2), and last week I began to study how
queue management works in Postfix. Of course, if any of you (seph?)
already has such a configuration working I'd be happy to study and
customize it.

For 1), I would like to thank Kurt Buff for pointing me to Gammadyne. I
already sent a note to $EMPLOYER on friday afternoon, and I'm currently
waiting for feedback.


Any further idea?


Now on your answers:

Tom Limoncelli (& Torleiv, Meenoo, Brandon...)
> Can't afford $15/month?  Certainly this is recouped if you spend an
> hour or two a week on this.
>         http://www.constantcontact.com/pricing/pricing-plans.jsp
> There is a free trial.

I discussed with $EMPLOYER's $CUSTOMER: it's a good price, but they are
concerned to send email via an external entity since they are also
sending passwords and private information. I know, I know...



Matthew Barr:
> http://dadamailproject.com/ 

That doesn't look exactly as the thing we need. And I'm not sure for
activecampaign, actually.



David Magda:
> At $WORK we have a group that uses Aprimo software for mass mailings

Which software exactly, please?



David N. Blank-Edelman
> Any method you use, whether it be an internal mailman list or the (recommended) ESP, will require somebody to collect a set of addresses and provide it to the mailing list manager software. I'd be curious how your users are  collecting the addresses in the first place for their ad hoc mail blasts. That might be a start towards understanding how to have them change the list in a "safe" manner (I'd also be curious to hear what the fear is here, what about this activity feels unsafe to you?). 

There are a number of ways that they receive request from $CUSTOMER's
customers (e.g.: email, phone, web forms). Putting together they things
they told me and the other that were left to my immagination, they
collect the addresses in a single text file and do copy-and-paste in
their Outlook/Thunderbird message window, then press "Send" :-(

Configuring a mailman for them to do the same job would mean to set up a
list for the one-shots and then : a) let them manage the
wipe-and-rewrite thing on the web interface or b) let them access the
"mailman server" command line and use the sync-lists command.

a) is prone to errors that would backfire support requests and b) would
probably generate support requests as well, since they are not technical
people and will require assistance more often than me and colleagues
would like.

Arthur Ramos jr.:
> Could you not write a script that sends the same E-mail to each person in
> the receipient list individually with the reply-to address set to the
> sender's E-mail? The only question to answer is where is the recipient list
> and how can it be read into the script.

What I'd need is not just a script, that would require me to run the job
for them. What I need is something for those non-technical people to
send messages through it, and letting it to manage the load to put to
the outside servers.

I would be able to write such a "gateway", but I don't want to because I
would be blamed if something goes wrong, may that be for my fault or
not. And, as many of you pointed out, chances for things to go wrong are
quite high (e.g.: it's easy to be blacklisted even if you did everything
with extra care).


Thank you all again!

Ciao
--bronto

-- 
                             Marco Marongiu
     System Administrator - Technical Author - Perl Programmer