NYCPHP Meetup

[Ian Forsyth]

Steve,

to send out 5000 emails using a solution you describe below on a shared 
hosting server would take 1/2 hour, to an hour with noticable server 
lag.. If you have developers on staff.. Go for it do it in house... get 
a server from rackspace.com, or dialtone.com ($150 bucks a month or so) 
or something similar.. developers getting at least $150 dollars a day.. 
it would not take long to get up and running, three months at a maximum 
..  but if you do not have developers already on staff I'd say give the 
responsibilty to some one else, and if they are failing find another 
company to do it for you..

In doing mass mailing (SPAM) there are a lot of concerns to keep in 
mind, RBL database, MAPS.. network up time.. HACKERS who don't like you 
sending out so much email.. the more 'popular' your ip, the more you 
have to be concerned about security.. though the managed hosting 
solutions mentioned above can help you with such duties..

So maybe you can do it semi in house.. Meaning you go with a managed 
hosting service provider, pay the extra fees for security and backup, 
and extra band width, and setup but develop the php/POSTGRES or MYSQL 4 
solution your selves.. thing is.. its kinda difficult to test for 
200,000 emails, this is why going with some one how specializes in mass 
mailing would be a good idea.. maybe you could host the front end.. 
then send a mass mailing company the list.. and say send these people 
email.. but you could maintain the list of people, and sell their 
addresses to as many people as you want.

I would not do it if you do not have developers weather contract or 
full time. When something breaks, it is best to not learn how to 
program at that time.

Anyways, those are my thoughts..

Ian

On Monday, March 17, 2003, at 04:52 PM, Steve Soler wrote:

> I have an opt-in email list of about 200,000 people.  I'm wondering if
> anyone knows of a shareware or commercial PHP/MySQL based solution for
> sending out bulk email.  It would have to have the following features:
> - Allow the creation of multiple mailing lists by duplicating existing
> mailing lists and also copying one mailing list to an existing.
> - Must be able to remove duplicates in each individual mailing list.
> - Force mailings to be associated with only one mailing list at a time.
> - Allow for optional demographics fields on the Opt-In form.
> - Handle Opt-Out / Opt-In requests for each individual email list.
> - Handle HTML email with optional plain text for non-html email 
> clients.
> - Monitor statistics for every delivered email that is viewed and the
> link clicked through to.
> - Provide a way for clients to view the live statistics of their
> particular mailing online.
>
> This solution can run on either a Windows 2000 box or a Mac OS X box,
> which ever is more convenient.  I know Mac OS X come with PHP and
> SendMail pre-installed being that it's really UNIX under the hood.
>
> I'll be using a broad band connection so I need this solution to use
> the sendmail program (or equivalent) to send the mailings right from
> the box it's installed on.  This is to avoid having to rely on an ISP
> or Web-hosts mail server which will think I'm sending out spam and try
> and shut me down.
>
> I hope this is clear and I hope some one knows of a solution out there
> that will do the job.  If there turns out to be none with these
> capabilities, I'm also interested in possibly hiring some one to build
> such a solution for me if the price is right.  All feed back is
> appreciated.
>
> Thank you,
> Steve Soler
>
>
>
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