Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with bulkemail

Can I safely block port 25 on my server?

ajbattrick — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:55:34 -0800

Can I block port 25 or not? I'm working on the firewall of a public facing webserver at the moment, and want to block TCP port 25 (SMTP) to incoming traffic as I'm seeing many connections that I just don't want to accept. The server does not handle any incoming email so this would usually be a no-brainer, just block and forget about it.

However, the server is sending around 25000 emails to a distribution list, two or three times a week. I am sure that AOL, or some other big email providers will block emails coming from servers that do not have port 25 open.

I don't want to just block it to test this and have a load of failed emails to deal with.

Do you know if I need to leave port 25 open or not?

Sending E-mail to a group

rolypolyman — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 15:37:04 -0800

What's a good Windows-based program for sending daily blind carbon copy E-mails to a small group of people (like 10 or 20)? The easy solution is that I could just paste all the recipients in PocoMail (the client I use) but I'm worried about, in some morning brain fog, accidentally pasting them all in the cc: rather than bcc: field and spilling all their identities (client confidentiality is important). So I want this to be automated.

Dreamhost (which I use) has an announcements list feature, but what they don't tell you is that messages go into a queue. Your message to ---- has been successfully sent to our announcement list queue. It will be received by the list members within an hour of when you scheduled it! Indeed the messages take 10+ minutes to get sent. No dice. My E-mails are time-sensitive.

It seems that there has GOT to be a simple program that simply looks at a flatfile of E-mail addresses and sends text to each user. Heck, I'd be glad to batch script this if there was a simple EXE out there for sending E-mail that didn't require compilation and a mess of third-party libraries.

Infacta GroupMail is one solution but it's way overkill. Majordomo is also overkill -- I can't deal with a lot of configuration and limited portability. It doesn't have to be this complicated.

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?

Weekly Emails

Framer — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:33:35 -0800

I'm looking for a way to send a weekly email to a list of members of a nonprofit organization I work for. (+) What I want to be able to do is be able to send a single message from my home office to an email address on my office server (NT server, Microsoft Exchange), and have the server in turn send it out to a text list of email addresses. Basically a glorified .forward file.

I don’t need anything fancy, like many of the list processing software packages I’ve seen – recipients don’t need to be able to change settings to their accounts or anything like that. Being able to get a single report of bounced emails would be nice, but not necessary.

Oh, and since our server is an ancient, steam-driven machine, it would be nice if it sent out the messages in batches rather than all at once, so that everyone’s access to the Internet didn’t basically shut down for an hour while it the newsletter was being sent.

We’ve just been using the BCC: field for a long time, but with 3000+ addresses, that’s getting unwieldy.

Maximizing delivery of bulk e-mails for an e-mail newsletter?

LairBob — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 12:25:42 -0800

I'm looking to help a client set up a totally legitimate outbound e-mail newsletter (all opt-in, for a known audience, etc.), and I'm trying to help them minimize bouncebacks on known addresses. Any experience with maximizing delivery of bulk e-mails? [more inside, and no, I don't want to spam anyone] Let me just reiterate a couple of points up front

1) This is for newsletter/announcement mailings to a group of recipients who have all given their e-mail addresses, and given explicit permission to mail them.

2) The issue is not bounce back on bad/out-of-date e-mail addresses. We're putting separate processes in place to deal with those.

The main problem is that they've used other, well-established mailing-list service providers, and gotten bounce-back rates of up to 40%, because of blacklists, outbound SMTP thresholds, and all the other infrastructure anti-spam hurdles that have cropped up in the past few years. They've now gone back on the other end of the spectrum so far that they're actually using an outdated version of "majordomo", and pasting in e-mail addresses one at a time. Not only is that a huge waste of time, but they have no tracking, etc. On the other hand, because it sends out the mails one at a time, they all seem to pretty much get through.

Here's what I'm looking for--a legitimate way of sending out several thousand e-mails (not all at once, but at least within a 24 hours period) in a way that won't either flip out their little local ISP, or send half the mails down a black hole. I think I've found a pretty good list management client, that's actually got a lot of flexibility in how it can send out the mails, but I want to tap into some previous experience, if I can, on setting this up. Any ideas?

What's the best software for bulk email?

muckster — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 15:08:57 -0800

A client wants to send bulk email. What's the best software? Is there a way to get address lists of people who might be interested in the product (shrink film), or do you just buy lists wholesale somewhere? Will I be lost to the Dark Side and land in the spammer's circle of hell if I set this up for them?