bulk email

best way to send email to 1500 customers

[happytrails]

We would like to send email to previous customers. We don't want all of the recipients to see other email addresses. What is the best way to do this? Can I import the addresses from Excel into Outlook? Is there good software available for this? Thanks.....

[Mike_Mackin]

Welcome happytrails

send the mail to yourself
then blind copy [Bcc] your customer list

[happytrails]

But... is there a way to import the addresses into BCC from an Excel spreadsheet?
I would like to avoid having to type in each address.

[EliteWeb]

There are plenty of mailing list/bulk email sending software, just hit up download.com and type in bulk email you should find something. Many of those titles are horrible and do not work properly when you have to authenticate your id against the smtp server. If you have a unix server you could ask your system administrator to put up EZMLM which is mailing list software - you can configure it in many ways from a whole discussion group to just annoucements.

[ralnikov]

[google.com...]
i think sometimes it's faster to ask google :)

[DaveN]

Yes ralnikov....But when you add your email address to download some of these bulk email collectors and delivery systems don't you find you start receiving SPAM!!

I Wrote a small script of a company to collect email addresses Via a enter email adress and we will send you serial Number for the Demo
Blah blah blah the only problem was they didn't have a demo or even a real product just away of collecting email address and selling them to people with a real product.

what i am trying to say is use a product that people can authenticate

Happytrails i've stickied you the one i have had experience with.

DaveN

[ralnikov]

First of all, i've never sent spam or bulk email and only tried to give someone a number of links to software. Use it or not - decide yourself. In other hand i've never understand why you should give your real/corporate email address to numerous web forms. I've couple of free web mail accounts which is used to fill out 'download' or 'your profile' forms. Yes, i receives a lot of spam to those addresses - but this is not a problem. click, click, click ... delete :)

[Crazy_Fool]

But... is there a way to import the addresses into BCC from an Excel spreadsheet?

yes. if you have windows nt / 2000 hosting you should be able to access an excel spreadsheet with ASP in much the same way as you would an Access database. it's easier to use an Access database than to use an Excel spreadsheet. use a web form to send the message to a simple script which can read these email addresses and send emails one by one or all in one go via BCC. i prefer one by one. 500 emails this way takes me about 2 seconds on my server using JMail or CDONTS.

you can improve on this by setting up your scripts so that if customers make an online purchase, their email addresses are automatically added to the spreadsheet / database. then any time you want to email your customers, use the web form again. no need to do any updates.