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
--
Guy Isabel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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