I've got a client with a 25,000 record database of contacts that they want to send emails to on a regular basis. All legit (i.e. not spam) and opted in and we offer an opt-out link on all messages.
I've got a small contacts system that I wrote that handles all the maintaining of contacts and sending of emails, but so far I've only used it for clients that have a few thousand contacts. I loaded the 25,000 contacts into the database and sent out the first email, but the company that hosts the site rang me to complain about the size of the mailout and that it had slowed down their mail server. Even though I had tried to ease the load on the servers by sending 100 emails at a time and then pausing for a minute before sending the next 100, the large number of emails (and bounce backs from bad addresses) had caused them some problems. The hosting company suggested that if I want to send such large numbers of emails that I should get my own mail server or use a third- party. Fair enough, they are afterall a web hosting company and not an email provider. So now I'm looking at other options. I've found the likes of mailchimp.com and campaignmonitor.com, and while they appear to be cheap at 1 cent per email they start to get a bit expensive when you're talking about 25,000 emails (and remember that pricing is in US $). What's involved in running my own mail server? I'm a small time developer that works from home and I only have a humble Vodafone broadband connection. I assume that running my own mail server would obviously use my own data allowance, and may indeed be against my ISP's terms and conditions. Are there any other options open to me? I could afford maybe $100 per mailing of 25,000. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
