Sending an email to everyone who has ever emailed me (gmail)

October 9, 2015 8:29 PM

I have a gmail account and want to potentially send an email to everyone who has ever emailed me (thousands of people). This is a one time thing, not something I anticipate ever doing again. Is there any way to do this? How would you go about doing it?
posted by 256 to Computers & Internet (17 answers total)

This sounds like a potentially terrible idea. But in the spirit of the question, how *I* would probably do it is: use something like gmvault to download all of my email; write a shell/sed/awk script to pull out the email addresses; do at least some basic grep filtering to pull out stuff like order confirmations, etc.; script sending it through something like Mandrill or Amazon SES (or use Mailchimp); be prepared to have that account disabled for abuse before the send finishes (maybe throttle it or send some via multiple providers if needed).

But unless the circumstances are truly extraordinary, I can't see this being something I'd ever endorse or recommend.
posted by primethyme at 8:57 PM on October 9, 2015 [6 favorites]

I believe that GMail limits you to 500 emails a day. Not sure if that is a calendar day or a 24 hour period. I just know that when I sent out about 750 emails (for a very good reason), I had to break it up into lots of 250 and wait until the next day to get out the last lot.

Not sure if you are planning individual emails to everyone or bcc'ing groups, but if you are not needing to do them all at the same time, break them down by groups of people you know in different social circles, in businesses, etc. Then send to the group at the same time so that people who are connected to others get theirs at the same time.

Also, depending on the content of the email, I would consider picking a random sample of the folks you are not close with and send to them as a group first and wait a day to gauge their reaction. It may help inform what you do with the rest of them.

The other thing that took some time was for me to make sure I was only sending one to each person. Some contacts have multiple email addresses. I did not want to send one to 256@work and 256@home. I downloaded my contacts as a csv file, put it into Excel, then sorted by email address to look for dupes and then I copied down the column 250 at a time and pasted them into draft emails. I had 3 or 4 of about 250 each. I sent them pretty close in succession until I got the "you have hit the daily limit of email addresses sent to message.

Also, if you send it from your account and don't use a service, be prepared to get a lot of bounces back. Accounts closed or mailbox full or no known addressee, etc. Those came flying back at me. I then had to edit my contacts list and my Excel spreadsheet.

As you can see, I am no computer expert. Just a guy who did something similar. I am sure there is a more efficient way to do this, but I did not want to spend any money and always default to trying things myself before I bring in the pros.
posted by AugustWest at 11:08 PM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Are you maybe trying to achieve something that could best be achieved by other means, like trying to tell everyone that you no longer use that account?
posted by themel at 11:58 PM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

The list of people who have ever emailed you likely includes order confirmations, customer service reps, spammers (and innocent people who have had their names and emails used in the From field on spam), discussion lists, newsletters, etc... Whatever the content of your email, you likely don't want to be writing all those people.
posted by zachlipton at 1:08 AM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I didn't think the content and context of the email would be particularly relevant to the question, but since people seem a little hung up on it:

This is not a personal email address. It is a submissions address for a magazine I am involved with. Everyone who has ever emailed this address has been someone submitting content for publication in the magazine (or the occasional spambot). I have an announcement regarding the magazine I would like to make, and I believe it will be relevant to the interests of the recipients. This would be the first mass email we have sent in our five years of existence and we do not anticipate sending another mass email any time soon.

If you still think sending this email is a terrible idea, I guess feel free to tell me.
posted by 256 at 5:13 AM on October 10, 2015

If they all truly emailed you first to submit something to the magazine you might be (barely) on the right side of the "spam" line with this for a one time update. I'd probably export the addresses and set up a proper Mail Chimp account to send the mass email.
posted by COD at 5:42 AM on October 10, 2015 [11 favorites]

I would explore this third-party Google Sheets script (note: I've installed / skimmed over the code but have never used this, so I cannot vouch for it), and then import the resulting CSV into TinyLetter (as long as the total is <5k).
posted by thejoshu at 6:33 AM on October 10, 2015

This sounds like a great use for Mailchimp.
posted by heathrowga at 7:00 AM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Just looking through a couple of my own function-not-person GMail accounts here, I'd estimate 80-90% of 'people who e-mailed this address' are either spammers or other automated accounts.

I think auto-mailing all of *those* would not only be a bad idea, it'd start the sort of spam looping cycle that'd get your account overwhelmed and/or locked.

Definitely export the list from GMail (all contacts > export) and manually cull it first.
posted by rokusan at 7:02 AM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

You don't need Gmail so much as a CRM app, like Highrise.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:38 AM on October 10, 2015

Since the emails are only from submitters, how many unique adresses do you think that actually is? Because it seems to me that taking steps to use other clients to download and then upload addresses to could easily take longer than handling this manually - or even over a few days or a week if the number is over 500. If there were a built-in function to make this easy that would of course be quickest, but since there's not - and for obvious reasons - the workarounds may take longer than just doing the work.

Please note also that in the US "every [commercial] message must include opt-out instructions. Subscribers cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than their email address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply email message or visiting a single Internet web page to opt out of receiving future email from a sender. The sender must honor the opt-out request within 10 days."
posted by Miko at 8:59 AM on October 10, 2015

Just plain old SMTPing thousands of emails is a bad idea no matter what.

I would compile a list and do this through MailChimp.
posted by humboldt32 at 9:03 AM on October 10, 2015

A good idea, because MailChimp will also give you an opt-out automatically, and will also not fill your inbox with bounced-back messages for every dead address.
posted by Miko at 9:12 AM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Mad Mimi is also a super simple option for this—I used it for something similar when I worked at a magazine and had a large number of email addresses I needed to contact about a contest. It worked well, once I compiled the list of addresses to feed it.
posted by limeonaire at 9:30 AM on October 10, 2015

N'thing MailChimp (or similar) - it'll be just as much hassle to do it any other way.

Why not use a tool set up for that purpose which has built in stuff to fix all manner of problems inherent in the task?

Plus, in the event you ever did need to send another, say in another five years time, you'd be all set up.
posted by motty at 10:41 AM on October 10, 2015

If you do this through MailChimp you will definitely face issues with that account. I guess if this is a one-off then that's a risk you're willing to take.
posted by masquesoporfavor at 10:44 AM on October 10, 2015

Keep in mind that there may be ramifications with scraping your Gmail account and uploading those emails to Mailchimp. Generally speaking, it's a violation of Mailchimp's terms of service to do that.
posted by Automocar at 11:35 AM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]