Best way to send lots of email

Mark Wieder mwieder at ahsoftware.net
Wed Sep 7 13:13:59 EDT 2005


Jacque-

Tuesday, September 6, 2005, 4:52:07 PM, you wrote:

> What's the best way to handle a private mailing like this?

I've recently run into this one myself working with a local nonprofit
here. There are a few solutions, all with problems:

1. Just send out all the emails at once. Problem: there's a limit to
the length of an address line (more properly several limits - the ISP
will have one, the sending mail client will have one, etc.) It usually
comes out to somewhere around 25 addresses per line, but I've seen
some that could handle nearly 100.

2. Break up the list into manageable chunks and send them out that
way. Problem: this means several different sends - the ISP probably
has limits on the number of identical messages that can be sent in a
given amount of time (in order to eliminate spamming). You'll need to
figure out a way to space them out, and that can cause its own kind of
problems. The usual way this works is that once you hit the limit you
can't send any more emails for a period of time (an hour or so).

3. Have the list hosted by the ISP or domain host. That way you send
out just one email and the ISP sends it out to everyone on the list
for you. The disadvantage is that if you want to select a subset of
the list you have to have sublists prepared ahead of time. This is
where we are now, trying to work out using MySQL to select the
sublist, then throwing that into a list that the domain server can use
as a source for emails.

4. Work out an arrangement with the ISP where they can put your IP
address into a list of folks who won't be trapped by the limit filter.
This depends on your relationship with the ISP, although after my
folks got banned by AOL twice they did get AOL to agree. I'm hoping to
get them onto a real ISP this month.

5. Run your own SMTP server. Shaosean posted a lib for this a while
back. This obviously gets around all the ISP issues, but you may have
problems if the recipient's SMTP server tries to do a reverse dns
lookup and can't verify you from the mx-records.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net




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