Sending hundreds of eMails

[Andre Garzia]

Once, I earned a living by sending emails. We sent millions per day. I was
an employee of a email marketing company, our clients were companies like
wallmart, readers digest and other retail stores here in Brazil. Our
millions emails went just in-country. Believe me, sending massive amounts
of email is tricky, there will always be clients who will treat is as SPAM.

You have a whole set of options:

1 - You can use Amazon Simple eMail Service: http://aws.amazon.com/ses/ if
you don't want to use their tools or craft your own tool to use Amazon
Simple eMail Service, you can use whoosh (http://www.theescapers.com/whoosh/)

2 - You can use some PHP script on a server to send the emails for you such
as outline by David and others.

3 - You can use LiveCodeServer script on on-rev or some other host just
like you can with PHP. RevIgniter has libraries for email sending.

4 - You can use an SMTP library and create a desktop stack to send the
emails in a loop.

If you are doing options 2, 3 or 4 then you need to be aware of some stuff:

* ONE RECIPIENT PER EMAIL. Do not send one email with multiple recipients.
This is almost certain to be flagged as SPAM.

* Fill your "from" field with a Real Existing eMail account that can be
verified by the receiving server. This is double plus good if you use an
account that has been used before to send email to that person

* Do not send lots of emails to the same server in a small period of time.
For example, suppose you need to send 500 emails to GMail accounts. If you
do a loop and send them all at once, there is a big chance you will hit the
spam box. The trick is to make it look and behave like normal traffic. Send
a dozen emails, wait for a while, then send some more. Create a scrambled
queue where the order is "mixed by domain". Just like a good music
playlist, you switch domains every four or five emails.

I could talk a lot about email but this is just some basic advise to get
you going. Also, if possible, send your emails from the same server that
hosts the sending domain.

=)