Mass mailing best practices

I’m building a feature for my app which allows the admin to compose an
email and send it to a list of registered users (~1000).

What is the best method for doing this?

Should I create one email and BCC all the recipients? Is there a limit
to how many recipients can be included in one email?

or

Should I send the same email to individual users?

In the past I’ve had problems with legitimate emails being flagged as
spam (usually on hotmail). Is one method more likely to be flagged as
spam then the other?

The app is hosted on Textdrive.

Mass mailing best practices

jumbo shrimp
military intelligence

Sorry couldn’t resist.

On 4/8/06, Hammed M. [email protected] wrote:

Should I send the same email to individual users?

I think this has the best chance to get past junk mail flags. Only one
recipient per email. It might look like a hand written email to the
junk mail filter.

Peter

jumbo shrimp
military intelligence

Sorry couldn’t resist.

Yeah. I thought the subject might stand out :slight_smile:

Should I send the same email to individual users?

I think this has the best chance to get past junk mail flags. Only one
recipient per email. It might look like a hand written email to the
junk mail filter.

Makes sense. I’m thinking of adding recipients to a table and then
sending them one by one.

Thanks

Charlie,

My app is hosted at Textdrive and shares an IP.

euforea.com => 207.7.108.149
nslookup 207.7.108.149 => pendrell.textdrive.com

Are mails send from a ???@euforea.com likely to be flagged as spam in
this case? Is a dedicated ip a solution?

The most important factor is the ability for the recipients servers to
do a reverse lookup on the senders hostname. I send out a fair amount
of legitimate mailings to clients. There were alot of clients who
weren’t recieving the mail I was sending because my mailserver was on an
internal ip with a private host name. Once I changed it so that the a
reverse dns lookup could be perfored, the mail reached the client
without being marked as spam.

Hammed M. wrote:

Charlie,

My app is hosted at Textdrive and shares an IP.

euforea.com => 207.7.108.149
nslookup 207.7.108.149 => pendrell.textdrive.com

Are mails send from a ???@euforea.com likely to be flagged as spam in
this case? Is a dedicated ip a solution?

You’re much more likely to get marked as spam when you send from a
dynamic ip address. Also make sure you can perfrom a reverse dns lookup
on your host name. AOL will block all email (they won’t even reach the
spam filter) if your hostname can be looked up.

Hammed M. wrote:

jumbo shrimp
military intelligence

Sorry couldn’t resist.

Yeah. I thought the subject might stand out :slight_smile:

Should I send the same email to individual users?

I think this has the best chance to get past junk mail flags. Only one
recipient per email. It might look like a hand written email to the
junk mail filter.

Makes sense. I’m thinking of adding recipients to a table and then
sending them one by one.

Thanks

As far as I’m concerned, the best practice with mass mailings is not to
do them – at allever. Rather, have a separate mailing
list(s) associated with the site/business/product/whatever, managed with
a mailing list manager. You need to get explicit permission for
email, rather than assuming that anyone who gives you his email address
desires every piece of email you could possibly send him.

Having said that, is there a Rails-based mailing list manager already
built, so a Rails site/application doesn’t have to use one written in a
foreign language, such as Python?

Hammed M. wrote:

Should I send the same email to individual users?


M. Edward (Ed) Borasky