Caveats of doing a mass e-mail

chef_boyardee — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 14:08:17 -0800

I want to send a large number of E-mails (like 500) to my customers. This isn't spam; they have definitely opted in and know me personally. I'd like to know if there is anything that might cause a problem here . . . My main concern is (1) getting on a blacklist and (2) taking heat from the company that owns the SMTP server (Dreamhost hosted service). I intend to send them from my laptop through my ISP (Sprint DSL) to my Dreamhost shared hosting SMTP server (relayed but with my authorized login). So do I have anything to worry about?

My understandings are:
1. This is not too different from running a package like phpBB, which spouts out a lot of administrative E-mails daily, except that I'm connecting to the SMTP server remotely.
2. AOL/CompuServe will likely blacklist me, but I have no idea how this happens.

Again, this is not spam, and the customers have asked to be on my announcement list. Would it be safer to have some other company (or Dreamhost's "announcement" goodie) do it, or can I do it safely as long as I have opt-out info and maybe an X-header of some sort?

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.

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Caveats of doing a mass e-mail

Sending E-mail to a group