[OPLINTECH] Advice on sending thousands of emails?

[Nathan Eady]

Phil Shirley <pshirley at CuyahogaFallsLibrary.org> writes:

> We want to send email to all of the roughly 16,000 patron email
> address we have, regarding our upcoming levy election. Below is how
> I'm thinking of doing it; any suggestions or comments?

A couple of minor comments:

1.  Put a sleep statement in the loop.  If you're sending to only
    sixteen thousand people, an extra one-second sleep per address only
    makes the job take about four and a half hours longer, and it won't
    make your system unresponsive, among other things.

2.  Expect to get automatically blocked by at least one of the major
    mail providers after you send essentially the same message to
    several of their users.  Do NOT attempt to work around this by
    inserting random junk in the message to make it superficially
    non-identical, or by sending from multiple addresses.  (Such
    cheating will get you on larger and worse blacklists used by
    multiple mail providers.)  You must accept that each mail server's
    administrator has the right to decide whether it's okay for you to
    send a bunch of his users the same message, and some of them have
    decided that it's not okay.  Hotmail is particularly likely to be a
    problem.
    
3.  Setting the precedence to bulk may reduce the number of domains that
    give you problems.  There are various other things you can do as
    well, to reduce the number of domains that block you.  Google has
    some guidelines here:

    https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=81126

    Most of that is good advice.  (I disagree, however, about sending
    periodic separate "by the way you're subscribed" messages.  That's
    just annoying.  Just put it in the message footer.)

4.  Send plain-text messages, *not* HTML.

5.  Don't do it very often.  Repetition will anger your patrons.

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library