1) I do not know of a way to force a personalized message with IMAIL's list
server
2) Yes - you could write single messages to IMAIL (or any other SMTP server)
by a variety of ways including blat, ASPQMail, Flicks, etc -
3) Definitely Win2k over NT -
I've done this quite a bit and I've used various kinds of programs,
databases, and techniques depending on the situation. You do need access to
quite a bit of bandwidth. Remember to figure additional for headers. A 4k
message can easily grow to 15k or more with headers.
Flicks component let's you always try the recipient's mail server first and
that is usually worth doing. Both AspQmail and Flicks have settings now for
scheduling too which might prove useful for your purpose. I have sent to
40,000 using AspQmail on a dual PII 400 with pretty much unlimited bandwidth
with good success. However, it was not using IMAIL as one of the mail
servers.
Actually I haven't really found anything faster to use for sending than
Microsoft's SMTP server. For 50,000 I would use a script in WSH of whatever
program flavor you like and use the CDONTS component. However, for 50,000
you'll want to make certain that you do not allow MS SMTP server to create
unlimited connections because it will try to do just that. Another problem
believe it or not is that if you are sending to many, many mail servers and
many of those are trying to check reverse dns then you can actually overload
your dns servers. So it is good to try to stay in control.
I think it is a good idea to give the recipient a link to click to unsub
himself too but this is usually one of those pieces of advice normally
disregarded by my clients. You
Then there is the problem of band email addresses. A list of 50,000 that
has not been dutifully maintained and worked can easily have 35% to 50% bad
addresses. A good list will have 10% so you do have to plan some method for
handling that. You can write a program to parse a bounced message and do
something with it and then use that as a program alias and have your sending
account direct back to that program alias. Usually though you may want to
just collect the bounces and then run a sniffer program against them all and
then do something with the addresses. But you still can expect a lot of
them.
Or at least that's my 2 cents and probably not worth that -
Terry Fritts
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Guy Isabel
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 4:39 PM
To: IMail Forum
Subject: [IMail Forum] Personalized newsletters?
Greetings, IMail Forum members,
I have been tasked with an "interesting challenge". I work for a large
Canadian university and our Development and Alumni Relations department
would like to send personalized newsletters once a month to about 50,000
constituents, each message averaging about 4 KB, thus about 200 MB to
deliver in total.
For the sake of simplicity, assume that there are only 3 topics of interest:
A (Science), B (Sports) and C (Arts). In reality, it is more like 25
topics. Each recipient has notified the department of the topics in which
they are interested. For instance: A+B, A+C, B only, etc.
A colleague of mine is writing a program that will output a list that will
have one row per recipient showing the e-mail address and their topic(s) of
choice. The program could also output a text file containing the "collage"
of appropriate topical sections for each recipient, thus making available
the entire body of the text to be sent to him/her.
Three questions (for now!):
1. Is there a clever way in IMail Server 6.05a of using the list server
function, program aliases or perhaps IMAIL1.EXE in some combination to
achieve this?
2. Would writing another program that calls IMAIL1.EXE (or perhaps BLAT.EXE;
by the way, which one is more efficient?) that goes through the list/table
created by the aforementioned program to e-mail each recipient with the
proper text body be a viable solution?
3. In either case, what hardware would you recommend for such a list server?
Which OS (Windows NT 4.0, W2K Server, W2K Advanced Server)?
I know that LISTSERV in combination with LSMTP, both available from L-Soft
International (http://www.lsoft.com/, specifically
http://www.lsoft.com/products/default.asp?item=listserv_database), could do
of on-the-fly mail merge and send to a single list of 50,000 recipients.
Unfortunately, this is not an option for us at the present time. We do have
LISTSERV but not LSMTP.
Any advice and comments gratefully received :)
Guy
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