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Yes, the "report as spam" button creates a lot of nightmares for all legitimate mass mailers, but, fortunately, it is not so seriously taken now as before. In some systems it is remembered as a personal preference and not all emails from the source are blocked.
If it happens too often, though...
You must NEVER resend a bounce. The time of full email boxes is gone, also a serious email system is not down for long, worst case scenario, a few of your subscribers will not get their newsletters, you can always blame some internet quirks, whereas dealing with blocklists is a real nightmare. A bounce means no longer sending until the customer logins. When logging in, a pop-up will tell him about the problem and why he is automatically unsubscribed. Transactional emails, of course, will still be going on.
If you follow this simple step will save you a lot of nightmares, and delivery reports will show the problem and then you can manually re-enable the delivery to those boxes, depending on the situation, but should default to no longer send, deferred or quarantined destination.
No offense, but I would beg to differ.
Sending large amounts of e-mail involves much more than a bunch of IPs and software that generates nice looking statistical graphs. You can look at stats until you are blue in the face, but they do little you navigate the mezzanine of policies that actually dictate how your mail is handled.
Reality is reality. In any event, good luck with whatever path you choose.
@Microlinux.... the naive line was not specifically pointed at you...
I appreciate and understand your concerns.
As @Maounique put it quite easy and rightfully... knowing "what" you are doing makes a whole lot of difference. The Key here is to manage bounces, keeping list hygiene. Who knows by the time I scrutinize my mailing list, I may be sending half of SMTP load what I'm planning here.
Sending out emails blindly is surely an offense and the mailing deserves to be penalized for such malpractice. Plain and simple reality!
Again.. many thanks even for the red flags... I will surely keep them in my reading list.
@mehargags
So at whom was that line pointed? Why did you mention it in the first place? What made you think it was relevant?
Personally I feel it wasn't necessary anyway because if you being naive or not was a question in anyones mind then there are enough threads from you to come to a conclusion.
Let me tell you one of those: it makes, for instance, the difference whether people can be played or not. And it makes the difference that people who do know can quite quickly spot those who don't - no matter how nice they talk.
@Microlinux told you his point of view. Straight and honest.
Many here are professionals, some of them with considerable experience in the field (and with diverse people, ranging from honest ones to scammers and trouble makers). It seems just natural that they know the difference between someone needing a little advice - vs - someone basically needing a tutorial for his - payed - job.
From what I see you have taken on a job for which you lack the qualification, sometimes even to a shocking extent. Simple as that.
Look at it from the bright side - he could have gotten a job being a fireman and lacked the qualification. THAT would be troubling
If you plan to look at and try commercial pieces of software, add CommuniGate to that list.
it looks like a complete CRM and help centre suite... can you point me where/what product caters to Bulk Mailing ?
Will this document answer your question?
In my experience, I worked with mass mailing services using CommuniGate since late 1999 (an example of long known hosting provider actively using it: Zenon N.S.P.)
+1 for postfix in load balancing mode or with multiple outgoing instances.
Interesting. Can you elaborate re said "multiple outgoing instances"? Specifically are you referring to multiple instances on one server? And if so, how does that help exactly?
@aglodek
Multiple processes or a multithreading MTA are useful because of the way SMTP works, namely that the largest part of time is spent waiting.
Multiple processes are much heavier than multithreading, though and harder to coordinate, too.
So, if a normal MTA is to be used I'd advise to have a look at xmailserver which is multithreaded (comfortably tuneable on command line).
Another hint: MTA often waste lots of time waiting for DNS info, so running a good DNS cache and pointing at it in resolv.conf will be helpful.
Thanks @Master_Bo
I've contacted Communigate, lets see there response...
Any idea on pricing ?
You're welcome. Pricing is displayed on their site, it's easy to spot. It matches their caliber.
However, if you wish to burn and learn, I'd recommend heeding advice already given, and try Postfix, Exim, Xmailserver... My personal preference is Exim, but all mentioned candidates match the task.
Or, if you don't wish to re-invent bicycle entirely, try Sendy.co and Amazon SES. That can send more than 400k messages daily even on its lowest speed, and takes care of mail delivery/complaints.
@Master_Bo
I want to try out Sendy, but without Amazon SES... I've read mixed content, but not sure if people are using it successfully without SES service with their own MTA. Any views on it ? buying Sendy won't be a big hassle, its a small amount, but if someone can share his views on using Sendy with EXIM, I'm game for it.
(this question can be a candidate for new thread... what say ??)
It is a large topic, go for it. Lots of interesting/informative posts already.
I think most of the pitfalls were already indicated, many applications recommended and almost all fit the task and the majority the bill, I think you could try a very conservative 100% FOSS setup and go from there.
If you struggle with that, you can always hire someone to do it for you or assist in the setup. I am against using commercial solutions in principle, for low volume up to a few thousand a day, paid one may work too (i mean mandrill or similar, not the software solutions), but for millions, you will ruin yourself unless the business is really that profitable.
Why?
Closed source in most cases, backdoors possibly, lock-ins by "designing" proprietary, "special" bugs which only paid support can solve. I could go on.
I am not saying open source is the only solutioon, but, if there is a working alterrnative, I automatically prefer the latter unless it is a very marginal thing, a one-off or something
everyone uses, such as windows or games.
There's no problem using arbitrary SMTP with Sendy, I just wish to paste what Sendy tells about that:
Apart from that, you can specify SMTP gateway on per-campaign basis. You will have to handle sending speed issues and bounces/spam complaints yourself.
Which kind of defeats the purpose of using Sendy just as a good mailing list software, as it'll be half a*se solution without SES.
@Maounique & @deadbeef, Yes I'm open to using commercial solutions, it is not just practice, it is indeed serious business for someone. However, I'm determined to give this a thorough learning and judge the possibilities and upgrade gradually (if necessary).
An important thing to consider is, the practice till now has been a total haywire, absolutely no administration on bounce handling or delivery tracking. The Sign up, itself is single opt-in, which has bloated the DB and Mailing lists both.
With a proposed double opt-in sign up --> Scrutinized Member list --> verified email IDs --> tracked Delivery records I'm sure we should be able to cut off a major chunk, and so will be well suited for the open source operations discussed here
Well, sounds like a plan, after all, from what you are saying, it cant be worse, right?
It was created assuming that SES is its primary operation mode.
I assume that handling everything that SES handles automatically would cost you more than 1$ per 10000 send emails.
However, you are free to contact Sendy developer (e responds quickly to questions on forum) and ask about SMTP mode. Also, read its forum, there are several threads related to using plain SMTP.
>
Summing up all of what you've said above, a little hard to believe your client's been sending out 10K-30K transactional emails DAILY with no bounce handling. How is it they are not blacklisted everywhere???
I dont believe that part.
Ever since (2 months) I have been migrating and planning mailing part for this client, I truly wondered the same. Infact their old IPs are not black listed anywhere, nor is the domain or anything serious. They were hosted with ixWebhosting, and the client's operating staff who used to coordinate with hosting provider said ixWeb never ever pondered them with any concerns, which adds more mystery and rather suspicion.
Such mailing Mal-practice with a managed service provider can only be achieved in one way, they would silently stop SMTP port to send out for this "innocent" and un-informed host, so that the mail blast doesn't go out at all. I can say this firmly because the client was absolutely not doing any bounce handling, and the delivery tracking done by some "custom perl script" would not report more than 4-5000 deliveries out of 1.5M scheduled.
So all I can conclude is, the mails in that amount never got out of the server to hit any RBLs or SMTP counters by public domains.
Further investigation, they were using cPanel on previous server. Their is an EximStats DB in mysql which supposedly tracks "defers" & "Failures". Checking the records reveals email Id's like [email protected], [email protected] totally undeliverable IDs, and the records were far too less than should be there.
On a Side note, Can you point me to some good cli/gui tools to read Eximstats?
**Exigrep **is what I should be using, any good guides to get started ?
Also, how can I setup Exim to fill stats into a MySQL DB like cPanel does, shall be helpful for the Devs to match up delivery records and clean Mailing list.
hello..you can create your own "high speed" email server on any reasonably fast laptop or desktop computer. I like laptops because they have their own built in battery backup. My most recent build sends 140 emails per second using Postfix and i have not done any special tuning to the master.cf or main.cf to make it happen.
the ingredients necessary to make this happen are: computer with new ssd and decent ram, follow the "perfect server" tutorial at ispconfig.org of your choice, and then install interspire's email marketer in a domain you own on your self built server.
sounds easy, but will take up to 20 hours to follow all the directions especially for a first time. What I found made all the difference in the world for sending speed is replacing the hdd with an ssd.
"on any reasonably fast laptop"
I cringed.
RIP email delivery, IP reputation, etc.
use a paid service.
$750/month will be far cheaper than your time building and maintaining... not to mention the cost when you mess it up.