Comments on: I'm not a spammer, I swear!

Question: I'm not a spammer, I swear!

Roger Dodger — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:00:32 -0800

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?

By: Robert Angelo

Robert Angelo — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:07:08 -0800

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.

By: Roger Dodger

Roger Dodger — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:10:44 -0800

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...

By: mr_silver

mr_silver — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:15:10 -0800

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.

By: occhiblu

occhiblu — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:25:13 -0800

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 DeanLastname@college.edu, we'd have created a new DeanFirstinitialLastname@college.edu 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.

By: Roger Dodger

Roger Dodger — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:27:15 -0800

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?

By: Mitheral

Mitheral — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:29:43 -0800

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.

By: phearlez

phearlez — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 11:42:02 -0800

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.

By: karen

karen — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:32:24 -0800

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.

By: Roger Dodger

Roger Dodger — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:54:12 -0800

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.

By: Roger Dodger

Roger Dodger — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 13:15:23 -0800

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.