Forum Moderators: coopster
I feel this is one of the most comman situation for big webmasters and I hope that some of the biggies here will be able to help me out with the problems. We have to send emails to our members about latest things coming up on our website. Here are some of the details that will help you understand the case.
1. We want to send HTML emails.
2. The member's details are in MySql DB.
3. The email address are at yahoo,gmail,hotmail and even some other @somedomain.com
4. We do have a cpanel/whm P4 2.4 Ghz, 1 GB RAM and Huge bandwidth dedicated server.
5. Everyday atleast 500,000 emails are to be sent.
We are not looking for a very advanced software packed with complicated features...we want to write our own PHP scripts and I think we will send emails using mail() in php.
Problems that we have:
1. Server load: will the server be able to send those emails without crashing. We don't mind getting more or upgrading it.
2. Will the emails be delivered to all, we are not doing spam we are sure users will open emails and will not add in spambox or something. However is there anyway we can find out which are the emails that are bouncing. I think yahoo groups can tell you if your email address is bouncing...how do they find?
3. what are the chances of Yahoo, gmail, hotmail blocking emails from our domain.
4. What are the chances our IP being added in black list. We do not mind adding some headers.
5. Do you know any other problem for doing such mail compaign.
I will keep all of you updated with the issues that come up and what kind of load it causes.
Thanks
Bye
If sending in bulk, then add a delay (if in php use sleep()) after each email is sent. How long depends upon the server.
Configure your email server (e.g. qmail, etc.) regarding retries and bounces. I'd suggest only trying once, then bouncing. It depends on what you can afford - you really want to avoid millions of emails retrying and sitting in queues if you can. The standard settings retry multiple times and varying times.
Get your bounces sent back to you, as they normally are. MAILER-DAEMON emails. You can use a quick shell script to find the email addresses from that list. Use something like:
grep -P "[^ ]+\@[^ ]+" /path/to/bounce/Maildir/new -RI'd do a 3 strikes and you're out method. If the email address is in the bounces, then UPDATE the database to show failures = failures + 1. Every month, UPDATE all non-zero failures to failures - 1. DELETE where failures = 3. That way only if you fail three times in a month do you get thrown off the list - you need this flexibility for people who let their boxes get overfull.
Maybe you will lost some thousand subscribers but you will be protectted against some thousand headaches.
thanks vincevincevince for your suggestions I will try finding out how to track bouncing emails with your tricks and update you.
Yea we will surely let users unbubscribe actually is not a mailing list we are actually running a national job portal in India. At the moment we have 50,000 users but we have signed up with Yahoo India and rediff so there is huge traffic that we are expecting in the coming weeks.
Users get emails for almost everything that they do. When they sign up, apply for jobs, get response on those applications and ofcourse for hot jobs and promotional letters bla bla bla..... so be assured that we are not spamming.
Not only half a million emails a day I hope we will cross 1 Million users very soon and cross 2 million emails a day. Then I will come back for more help...lol and yeah spammers will not take 3 servers.
please let your suggestions flow in.
Thanks
bye
