Bulk emailing, mail servers, web based email etc

Any tips or general guides ?

[stuart]

I'm hoping to start sending regular 300+ mailings to (opted-in) groups of customers but am currently only using OE6. I read somewhere that you can set up linux on an old machine and run your own mail server, which sounded like a very good but complex idea.

I'm not quite looking for clever code and linux info (yet!) but if anyone can offer any tips or general guide or overview of whats involved with this sort of email set up? Or the best type of set-up?Any information would be much appreciated; software, scripts, spam, security, servers, databases...anything that maybe useful.

I did a bulk emailing once before using a free group mail program (about 1,000 emails; 20 groups of 50 right after each other) and ended up with some from or about spamcop. I'm starting to get customers and contacts grouped in a database and am just looking to get better control over marketing to them.

Thanks in advance for anything and everything. Stuart.

[richlowe]

I use three different services for email. Argosoft for my own email server. It's simple and easy to install (and not very expensive) and handles as may domain names and users as I want. I use an autoresponder service (sticky if you want name) for a daily newsletter (350 issues so far) and an opt-in email list service for my weekly newsletter. I use paid services for the last two because then I don't have to bother with them.

Almost all of my email (excluding the two newsletters) is now down by my own email server and I'm so totally happy with it - I also run my own DNS servers (two of them) and web servers (two of them, one IIS and one apache) so I have complete control of everything. Having my own email server was one of the best things I ever did.

RIchard lowe

[Mardi_Gras]

You mentioned responses to your mailings from SpamCop. There was an excellent article (mentioned here recently by someone else) regarding the problems caused for newlsetter delivery by e-mail servers filtering content. I don't think it offered any answers; it just recounted some problems you may want to be aware of in advance.

It was in Tidbits, and referenced their problems getting their own opt-in newsletter to clients. The link is:

tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-637.html#lnk4

It's worth a look!

[txbakers]

You would be better off hosting your own mail server if you are planning to do bulk mailings.

ArgoSoft is good, I use Mercur Mail Server.

It's not hard to set up a mail server on your system. You do need, of course, a static IP address.

[stuart]

Many thanks everyone for your replies.