how to mass-email?
 

We email a subsciption-based newsletter to about 4000 clients every weekday...or at least we did. I'll spare you the reason that we stopped, let's just say the owner of my company is a twit.

So now, I need to get this thing going again, and I know exactly nothing about how to do it. I'm pretty sure that gettign an AOL or Yahoo account and emailing through that ain't gonna work.

What is the best way to send thousands of emails daily? Rent space on a server and use a program like GroupMail?

Help!

Thanks

Have you got an IP address that you could setup a small mailserver on? The hardware could be leftovers for this kind of application, and there are a couple of opensource mail server programs that allow that kind of addressing. Or hell if you setup your own POP3 server in house you could just use Outlook with a global address list!

how is the list being managed?

i do some of the mailings for my church...we're around the 500-750 mark, so slightly smaller scale, but the kind of mailserve we use is pretty dependant on the database system we use for subscription.

Just write a steamy love letter to your wife; somehow, it will magically end up sent to your entire client list. Then, retrace your steps to figure out how you did it. :D

Best. Idea. Ever. :lol:

I would suggest some mailing list manager like Majordomo.

It's free and open source.

http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/

Let's assume for the sake of this discussion that the twit in question keeps all the email addresses in some stupid format like a Microsoft Word doc, and that regardless of what system we use, there will be a long painful one-at-a-time importation of email addresses that will be done by Twit Jr.

Soooo....a mailing list manager. This is something that I run on a server somewhere? I rent server space and get an ip. Then I upload the software, edit my subscriber list, upload my newletter and hit send...all via a web interface?

An easy solution would be to write a simple Perl script or something that takes a list of e-mail addresses and a message file and then simply runs "mail -s `Subject` `address #x` < message" or something like that, with appropriate timing between each iteration so you don't overload your mail server.

All you'd need to do it is grab a Linux/BSD machine or else a Windows machine with Cygwin and set up mail [or whatever mail program you do want to use] to point at the appropriate SMTP account you're sending from.

if you're going to be putting in to a database...there should be good ways of importing from text formatted lists, as long as there are separating characters or hard returns.

OK it sounds to me like you're saying that your boss is being stubborn and refuses to move to anything standard and manageable, instead opting to micro-manage somebody into maintaining a giant MS Word document.

Am I far off?

If not, then here's what I suggest:

1) Get some server space on a host that lets you log in to the console and send e-mail from your host. The former should be pretty easy, the latter might not (ISPs dont like hosting people that might really be spammers)

2) Write a Word macro that Twit Jr. can click after editing the address list that tidies up the list, exports it into text, then attaches that text file to an e-mail and sends it to you. This is fairly straightforward; just use the MS Ofice macro recorder.
3) When it's time to send the newsletter, create an e-mail in a text file, then use SFTP or something to send that file and your latest address list to your server.
4) Log in to the console on your server and run:
Sendmail (installed by default on most *nix systems) will be smart enough to queue the thousands of messages and send them as fast as it can.
5) Curse your Twit boss for not letting you use an appropriate mailing list service like Majordomo.

This should take you at most 10 minutes a day...but obviously it's not the right way to do it. This is why managers are supposed to say "please do this for me" instead of saying "do this for me, and do it like this!.

Cant be done without running your own server

Not necessarily...If you have shell access to your server there's all kinds of things you can do. Even without shell access many hosts provide mailing list services. This is not an impossible task.