The cheapest option would be to host the images on Amazon S3 and send the email with Amazon SES. SES charges a 10¢ CPM , and data transfer in is free ( so you don't have to run the app on EC2 ). You do pay bandwidth, but it's their standard 12¢/GB charge. Your effective CPM ends up being around 13¢.
If you drop the pyramid/sqla dependency, this $59 app installs on php +mysql and does custom campaigns -- http://sendy.co The downside is that it's not open source and there's no api. All that being said... if I had to do mass mailing + pyramid/sqla, i'd probably do it like this: - EC2 instance handles sending emails though SES + the bouncing + the receipt tracking - EC2 instance has an API that lets you drop a "payload" file of addresses + content for processing , then triggers it - EC2 instance has another API that does periodic data dumps and polling the reason i'd offload onto a dedicated EC2 system, is that mass emails tend to have more annoying concurrency issues. too many people read the damn thing at similar times, so tracking beacons can bottleneck. dealing with all the sending / bouncing can be a strain on your resources -- and you'll likely want to do "warmups" on your IP in order to deal with ISPs and email companies blocking you. warmup is when you let emails trickle out, first by the dozen , then hundreds, then thousands -- if your IP gets flagged from suddenly sending too many emails, it gets blacklisted. If money isn't an object though, i'd definitely go with piping emails to SendGrid or SailThru which both have robust APIs. SailThru is more expensive but totally worth it. Managing your own outgoing email is a fucking pain -- after you get all the DKIM+SPF stuff set up, you have to start and maintain relationships with major providers like AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc to deal with bounce and false-postivie patterns. That's nearly a fulltime job. I prefer letting vendors like those 2 handle it. They're both better products and better priced than companies like ConstantContact, MailChimp, etc sorry if i got too much into the business side - i oversaw daily and weekly newsletters for a handful of premium publishers. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
