31–40 of 49 posts
Can anyone suggest a solution that allows tracking of opens, bounce backs, and other standard metrics?
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Guestimating around 100K+ per month initially. Google Apps Premier allows 2000 per day per user. Which isn't bad for $50/year. That is not a bad option but quite manual. Authsmtp seems pricey in comparison.
I'm not sure what you mean by "quite manual?" You just need to set up the Google Apps service manually; everything else (including creating accounts, new addresses, sending emails, creating email aliases, etc.) is fully "automatable" via their API; with wrappers available in Python, PHP, C++, Java, Ruby, Perl, and more....
I'm working on an application where I need to send emails to 10,000+ users. The emails can be sent: multiple times per day, daily, weekly, or other. The content of EACH email is completely custom HTML (not swappable fields, but sort of like a custom RSS feed in an email.) Can anyone suggest a solution that allows tracking of opens, bounce backs, and other standard metrics?
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I think it's unreasonably low too, but haven't figured out a way to solve it. You can benefit by signing up other users, but this is not a very often used feature. It's not an MLM site, but a subscription chess service. We track signups by ip and by browser cookies, so we're reasonable sure these are distinct people. Since we switched to the freemium model, there is little incentive for people to make duplicate accou…
I'm assuming your forward and reverse DNS match? http://blog.fastmail.fm/2007/12/05/sending-email-servers-bes...
I would advise doing it yourself. It isn't that hard, and assuming email is an integral part of your service, I wouldn't trust anyone else with it. In terms of specifics, I like qmail. In terms of spam management, there are lots of things to do. First and foremost, have daily monitors on all the major email providers. Get on all their feedback loops. I've found that contacting them with problems is annoying, but does…
Doing it yourself is hard, especially if you want any hope of getting past the major email providers spam filters. We deal with this every day. Current stats say that our % of users who have signed up that make it through email confirmation step is about 22%. Around 33% or so of our signups have yahoo.com addresses, and only about 12% of those manage email confirmation. It is similarly bad for hotmail. GMail used to…
There are a few things you have to get right (DNS including a PTR for your IP, SPF and now DKIM, RFC compliance in your server and configuration), but once that's done, bounce rate will be nearly as low as the quality of your list allows. Hitting the spam filters isn't all that bad either--assuming your message isn't spammy on other counts.
One other thing to be wary of: Sending to the same domain many times in rapid succession. Be sure you're not sending more than one or two messages at a time to Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail (or any single server). So, randomize the list, and sleep for a second or two between each send, or something, to insure that there are pauses.
Oh, and at least Google's spam filters are reputation-based (and probably many others are, as well). The looser you play with the "opt in" requirement, the more likely you are to be flagged as spam by your recipients. It only takes a few to get your future mailings dumped into the spam folder. At that point your server itself is poisoned from sending to that destination for a while. So, make sure your recipients actually want what you're sending them.
As long as your SMTP server is reasonably secure (you can run simple blacklist tests on it from various sites), you shouldn't get caught by IP-based spam filters, and then it's just a question of whether your content looks spammy to your recipients' mail systems. That's unrelated to how you're delivering the email, so it's the same problem no matter what you're using to send.
I would advise doing it yourself. It isn't that hard, and assuming email is an integral part of your service, I wouldn't trust anyone else with it. In terms of specifics, I like qmail. In terms of spam management, there are lots of things to do. First and foremost, have daily monitors on all the major email providers. Get on all their feedback loops. I've found that contacting them with problems is annoying, but does…
The default qmail install will accept and queue incoming messages for accounts that don't exist on the system, and bounce them later (usually to an unrelated, innocent address) if the account isn't created. Did you do anything in your installations to address that problem? If so, what was it?