I'm not a spammer, I swear!

March 7, 2006 10:00 AM

Legitimate bulk emailing: My department has a need to send out surveys to a large number of former students. The catch is that the reply-to: fields must be altered, so that the responses go to the deans (or whoever is designated to read them) of their respective departments...

We are looking for a inexpensive, even free, solution to make this happen. They first tried to have someone in the office code up a bulk e-mailer, but he just moved out of town before he was finished. I'm going to look at the code this afternoon and see if I can finish it, but I've never really done anything fancy with e-mail before. They also looked at using the Micro$oft mail merge facilities, but it seems there is no way to change the reply-to: field. Of course, only one address should show up in the to: field.

This may happen at most once a year, so we really don't want to sink very much money into it. Any suggestions?

posted by Roger Dodger to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Wouldn't it be easier to process the survey responses by having the recipients go to a web page instead of replying to an email? That way, you could have them fill out a simple form and save their responses in a database. This works fine if you have "essay questions" or multiple-choice or yes-no. Lots of cheap & simple tools (even Front Page, Dreamwaever, etc) let you do this.

Second cheap simple idea: Set up a new email address to --send-- the emails, and this can also be the one that receives the replies.
posted by Robert Angelo at 10:07 AM on March 7, 2006

Response by poster: There will be lists of students from each department, and the confidential responses may only be seen by certain people in each department, so a central clearinghouse that the responses must go through is not going to work. At least that's what they are telling me...
posted by Roger Dodger at 10:10 AM on March 7, 2006

What operating system are you using? How is your email sent?

It's pretty easy to write a perl script for use on a Linux box with sendmail, but if you're using Windows and a SMTP server then you need to do something rather different.
posted by mr_silver at 10:15 AM on March 7, 2006

My company got around this by setting up a new email address for the CEO, and sending all the email from that new email. So, if the dean's actual address was [e-mail], we'd have created a new [e-mail] and sent the surveys out from there; that way, his actual inbox isn't cluttered with surveys and students don't have his real address (if that's a concern).

On preview and better reading, looks like Robert Angelo had the same idea.
posted by occhiblu at 10:25 AM on March 7, 2006

Response by poster: All of our workstations are XP boxes, but we do have a Linux server in the office, and they are all connected to the university network. I don't really have any experience with email, though I have done php and perl. I think the solution my coworker started is in Ruby, but I won't see it until later this afternoon. I'm pretty sure he was just manipulating sendmail.

I can get my university e-mail through IMAP when on the network (with thunderbird) and they also have a web portal for retrieving e-mail. But I'm not sure that my coworker was even messing with that. Since he was going to change the reply-to: it really doesn't matter where it came from, correct?
posted by Roger Dodger at 10:27 AM on March 7, 2006

Why not break down that one huge mailing into pieces by reply-to:s? Just send out 20-30+ mailings each with the correct reply address. It wouldn't be all that much work and you could personalize the outgoing message.
posted by Mitheral at 10:29 AM on March 7, 2006

I have some perl code that I wrote to do this kind of thing, if you're competent in it and have a MySQL db to store the to and reply-to sets in (or the knowledge to alter it to pull from a different source) I could probably be persuaded to send it to you.

My email address is in my profile.
posted by phearlez at 11:42 AM on March 7, 2006

Best answer: I use some php (it's called phpmailer) code to send emails from a freebsd server. I believe it's capable of doing this. if you still need it, contact me karen at karenika dot com.
posted by karen at 1:32 PM on March 7, 2006

Response by poster: karen, PHPmailer looks like it may work. I found it on sourceforge. I'll take a closer look.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. And I may just email you for that code, phearlez if PHPmailer doesn't work out.
posted by Roger Dodger at 1:54 PM on March 7, 2006

Response by poster: PHPmailer did the trick. I have it pulling addresses, student, and department info from a couple of different tables in the database. Then, I build some personalized emails to make it appear that the emails are coming from the student's department, and it sends them all off automatically. Good find.
posted by Roger Dodger at 1:15 PM on March 8, 2006