Sorry for a second post so soon

I'm helping out with the planning for my high school reunion, and we've run into a little stumbling block. We've collected about 170 emails so far, and tried to send an initial email to those people, but have received quite a few rejects due to spam filters.

I'm a little surprised that this occurred, because I wouldn't have figured that 170 was an enormous amount, and I'm pretty sure GMail's own limits are far higher than that.

We would like to use pay services as a last resort, as we have $0 in funds to start with. Does anyone have a suggestion?

Did you put 170 addresses in the To: field? You could try putting them all in the Bcc: field and put the list admin address in the To: field. This might trip some spam filters, too, because the user's email address won't be visible in the headers.

If that fails, it ought to be pretty easy to write a script to automate 170 emails one by one. Well, if you hadn't eschewed a real OS. I suppose perl is available for Win32.

Doing a massive To: list is bad because you'll be exposing each persons email address to everybody else.

I'm hoping that the person who sent it out didn't do that. I'll have to check, though...

You can try force subscribing them to a Yahoo group you create specially for this. It lets you set it to be an announcement only list as well so it stops people from mailing back unless they're on an approved senders list.

An outlook mail merge? Google says it's possible, never done it myself.

Also, do eVite or a Google Calendar event make sense for your situation?

Of course then this requires that people expose their email addresses to Yahoo.. ugh.

Excellent question, but unfortunately no.

I just logged into the GMail account we're sharing for this purpose and looked at the email. It looks like the user actually did the proper thing. He BCC'd all the addresses and put the sender's address in the To: field. Both are what Google suggests. I then looked at the bouncebacks, and from what I could tell, they are all actually from Google, not the recipients' mail servers. The link the bounceback sends you to then suggests using various sites like Google Calendar and Youtube to send out massive alerts to users.

The problem with this is these sites are for very specific purposes. The email we're currently trying to send out is to inform people of two things: the existence of a website (and a Facebook page), and to request that they take a survey on the website. One of the things the survey will decide is which of five dates the reunion will actually take place on. So that eliminates a Google Calendar event email. Argh.

For now, I think I might try just sending out small batches of emails, sadly. Hopefully there won't be many bouncebacks...

It shouldn't be too difficult to install phplist somewhere. Can't be too hard to install a php webserver and mysql on one of your Winders machines.

Heck, there are native Windows clients for send-only newsletters.

I'm sure there are dozens of mail-merge programs available for Windows that you can use. You supply the body of the email and a list of email addresses and names - it takes care of the rest.

For the Mac, I use a program called Direct Mail which has worked quite well. I've probably only sent out 1 mass email per year in the past three years, but each time the program was a massive time saver. It also allows spacing out the sending so you don't run into trouble with hourly quotas on you mail server.

How about sending an actual letter

It would cost $75?

Bitt, I tried a couple of those apps from Tucows, but they just didn't work correctly for me for some reason.

I finally came across a solution, though. I was able to instantly set up a poMMo mailing list site on the web space I'd devoted to this reunion project, and I just finished sending out a mass mailing to 169 people with zero bouncebacks (other than an out of office notification).

I'd first tried Dadamail, but found it too clunky and wouldn't let me add my list of contacts without notifying them that I was adding them (I understand why, but it's still annoying). poMMo has a good UI and lots of options for slowing down the sending of mail, including setting timeouts between sending two emails to the same domain. I erred on the side of caution and chose options that took my 169 emails about 55 minutes. That's perfectly fine with me, as this list won't ever get larger than 500, most likely about 300, so it can take as long as it wants.

Outlook e-mail merge seems so nice, but it's a total pain, fraught with errors and work-arounds.

The best mass e-mail method? Conficker's Waledac spambot.

So what's the best way to send out a newsletter to 200,000 subscribers?

I recently ended up needing to send out the same email to about a dozen people, but not let them see each other, nor hide their addresses in the Bcc field. I ended up using Mail Tweak's Personalize Messages feature. I didn't need to personalize the messages, but it still sends out individual messages to each person on the To field.

Veeeery slooooowly...

For free, it would take a long time, I'd imagine. Almost every email service out there has hourly and daily limits on how many emails you can send. You might have to find a paid service to do this, in which case I apologize but I haven't researched those. I was looking for a free service because that's about what my group can afford for this reunion, and we'll only have a maximum of 400-500 emails we need to send out at a time.

My only recommendation is don't use your regular email server; use a different IP address. The company I was with had to prohibit employees from directly sending bulk mailings after the umpteenth time we got put on the RBLs from too much volume or complaints from customers who'd opted out with a different office or unit. It wasn't worth having our regular email interrupted.

We required our offices to let us scrub any mail list for opt-outs, include our centralized opt-out link in the message, and then use one of two approved sending methods: either a third party service (not too expensive, good delivery rate, and very good bounce reporting), or launch them from a server at our hosting provider, one that doesn't otherwise do email (almost free, but more RBL issues, and only so-so bounce reporting).

-jk

That's what I am afraid of is getting blacklisted. Is it pretty much a given that I'll get RBL'd?

Does it help to throttle it down? One send per three seconds would take a week, which I'd find acceptable. Even two weeks would be fine.

In my experience, we got put on RBLs in a heartbeat from the mailings (a list typically had 500-5000 addresses), though most of them weren't big enough to cause real problems. We never tried throttling - we were creating and marketing events, and couldn't afford to slow them down.

A board I run has similar problems. We're a modest site (anywhere from 5,000 to 25,000 posts a month, with about a thousand active members) and we share a server with a score or so of other sites. I'm forever working with Hotmail/Live and BellSouth (but oddly never the rest of ATT, at least so far) to allow our modest number of messages through - mostly registrations, notifications of PMs, and thread subscriptions. My hosting provider claims none of the sites do bulk email, but I'm not sure (otherwise, they're solid). But still, once a quarter or so I'm jumping through hoops for the big guys.

But first things first - check the Terms of your ISP and see what's allowed. Many of them ban bulk mail, though I don't know how - or even if - they look for it. I do suspect my two problem ISPs have bots that spot and act on the repeat traffic from our board.

-jk

You could use a service like Eloqua. For the Digiman's question, you can do this in Salesforce.com up to 500 emails per day.

Jim

My ISP (Cox) has a form to fill out if you send more than 500 emails at a time. We regularly send out 2000+ at once, several times a week. While we DID get blacklisted initially (we hadn't yet learned about the form), once we explained to the ISP what was going on they were cool about it. We DO send in blocks of less than 500 addresses in the BCC field, though.