[OPLINTECH] Advice on sending thousands of emails?

[Karl Jendretzky]

On that topic...

Now that I've launched the new OPLIN mail server, the original server only handles the list servs and lives at lists.oplin.org. My plan is to set it up as a bulk mailer, so that anyone who needs to send out a mass of email can use it as a relay without disrupting the mail flow of their regular mail server, or the primary OPLIN mail server. Currently it will relay for anyone inside the OPLIN network (as always), but ultimately I'd like to lock it down based on specific originating IP addresses. 

This transition will go hand in hand with disabling unauthenticated SMTP relaying for the OPLIN network on the primary OPLIN mail server. I'll bring it up a few more times before actually making any changes, but I'd suggest anyone using mail.oplin.org as a relay for ILS notices or automated mailers instead switch to lists.oplin.org. As a bonus I've been signing lists.oplin.org up as a bulk mailer everywhere I can, so in theory many services should already be expecting bulk generic mail flow from that ip address.

Karl Jendretzky
Technology Manager
Ohio Public Library Information Network
jendreka at oplin.org
(614) 728-1515 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nathan Eady" <oplintech at galionlibrary.net>
To: oplintech at lists.oplin.org
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2011 3:42:35 PM
Subject: Re: [OPLINTECH] Advice on sending thousands of emails?

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
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