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email post on LG

Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]


Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:06:52 -0500

----- Forwarded message from Danny Holstein <[email protected]> -----

Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:12:56 -0500 (EST)
From: Danny Holstein <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: email post on LG
Ben;

I read a post of yours on mass emailing on Linux Gazette -- I found the post since I was looking for information on mall emailing in Linux. Since we have a small gourmet foods shop in New Jersey and have compiled a customer list of nearly 1000 emails, we figured we'd use it to announce a sale and specials; nothing nefarious about our intentions. It turns out kmail and evolution aren't well-suited to the task, a significant proportion of emails have been changed (earthlink/mindspring -> embarqmail), mistyped into the database, or have simply been abandoned; we got about a 15% bounce rate.

I imagine a good mass mailer would have hooks for database import (MySQL on a LAMP server) and have a means for "fixing" the database based on bounces and "UNSUBSCRIBE" requests.

Regards;

Danny Holstein

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *


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René Pfeiffer [lynx at luchs.at]


Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:25:19 +0100

On Feb 23, 2009 at 1306 -0500, Ben Okopnik appeared and said:

> ----- Forwarded message from Danny Holstein
> <[email protected]> -----
>
> Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:12:56 -0500 (EST)
> From: Danny Holstein <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: email post on LG
>
>    Ben;
>
>    I read a post of yours on mass emailing on Linux Gazette -- I found
>    the
>    post since I was looking for information on mall emailing in Linux.
>    Since
>    we have a small gourmet foods shop in New Jersey and have compiled
>    a
>    customer list of nearly 1000 emails, we figured we'd use it to
>    announce a
>    sale and specials; nothing nefarious about our intentions.  It
>    turns out
>    kmail and evolution aren't well-suited to the task, a significant
>    proportion of emails have been changed (earthlink/mindspring ->
>    embarqmail), mistyped into the database, or have simply been
>    abandoned; we
>    got about a 15% bounce rate.
>
>    I imagine a good mass mailer would have hooks for database import
>    (MySQL
>    on a LAMP server) and have a means for "fixing" the database based
>    on
>    bounces and "UNSUBSCRIBE" requests.

http://www.openemm.org/ might be interesting. There was a review in a German GNU/Linux magazine a few months ago.

Best, René.


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Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]


Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:44:31 -0500

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 01:06:52PM -0500, Danny Holstein wrote:

> 
>    I read a post of yours on mass emailing on Linux Gazette -- I found the
>    post since I was looking for information on mall emailing in Linux.  Since
>    we have a small gourmet foods shop in New Jersey and have compiled a
>    customer list of nearly 1000 emails, we figured we'd use it to announce a
>    sale and specials; nothing nefarious about our intentions.  It turns out
>    kmail and evolution aren't well-suited to the task, a significant
>    proportion of emails have been changed (earthlink/mindspring ->
>    embarqmail), mistyped into the database, or have simply been abandoned; we
>    got about a 15% bounce rate.

Neither of the above is very surprising, of course; GUI clients tend not to be very useful for script-type processing, and link rot/email rot occurs at a steady pace.

>    I imagine a good mass mailer would have hooks for database import (MySQL
>    on a LAMP server) and have a means for "fixing" the database based on
>    bounces and "UNSUBSCRIBE" requests.

This might be a bit of a paradigm shift - but I would consider using a mailing list instead of trying to cobble together a solution. It's got all the features you're looking for (unsub/bounce/defer/reject handling, etc.), and most of them use, or can use, a database as a back end.

What we use here is Mailman, one of the most popular list managers out there. As far as I know, it stores its member data in text files - but it can use MySQL via the "MySQL Member Adaptor":

http://loeki.tv/log/archives/81-Setting-[...]o-store-members-in-a-MySQL-database.html http://trac.rezo.net/trac/rezo/browser/Mailman/MySQLMemberAdaptor

Although with only 1000 members, I wouldn't bother. Even if you grow significantly, Mailman can handle it without any trouble. I've heard of people running it with ~20k subscribers, and they have no complaints.

-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *


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Danny Holstein [dgholstein at embarqmail.com]


Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:58:05 -0500 (EST)

Thanks, sometimes the solution is "right under the nose" -- since we use OpenSuse, I can simply install mailman from the distribution. Of course, since it's in Python, it may not be too difficult to use PyODBC to access our database.

Regards, ...Dan


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Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]


Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:11:04 -0500

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 05:58:05PM -0500, Danny Holstein wrote:

> Thanks, sometimes the solution is "right under the nose" -- since we
> use OpenSuse, I can simply install mailman from the distribution.  Of
> course, since it's in Python, it may not be too difficult to use
> PyODBC to access our database.

That's a lovely thing about Linux. :) Pretty much everything and anything is there, already in the repositories. Glad I could help, and good luck!

-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *


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