We have a newsletter where people opt-in (everything is on the up and up here). As people leave jobs (fired, layoffs, etc.), we still send to those emails and now after a few years, we have a considerable amount of emails that need to be purged.
The inbox that is receiving the bounces/invalid emails is a gmail account. We can filter (via a search) and find the emails that need to be removed but how can we export those emails to a list so that we can clean up our distribution list? Are there any tools that would help simply this?
We are looking into mailgun and sendgrid for future send outs but we need to clean up the list before we migrate. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
Our tech stack is apache/coldfusion 11 (not that it matters but in case it helps).
You could use CF to log into gmail and pull all the messages. Then loop through them all to find the bounce messages. Appending those bounced email addressed to a simple flat file. If you want to get fancy you can use a database, but I think a simple text file would do in this case. One email address per line.
I just read that you are deleting those bounced email addresses from a database. IF you're confident of your coding the above idea, you could directly delete from your database rather than saving a file.
Related
I recently received an email through Gmail which I happened to forward on to another account of mine luckily...
When trying to find the original email, I searched and searched, and couldn't understand why it wasn't there?!
Turns out Gmail recently introduced Confidential emails, I'm sure this is useful for some people, but this is an absolute nightmare for me. Anything with importance enough to send confidentially, is critically important and must be kept.
For those of you who also have no idea what this is like I didn't; you can set a time limit for the email, or withdraw it at any time, and gmail will unassign the recipient from being able to read it,although it still persists on the server
Does anyone know how I can set an automatic rule in Gmail to specifically make a copy of only emails with this new "confidential" tag? Or at least emails that are time limited / can be withdrawn?
I know there are rules to copy all incoming mail, this is not what I want as it would fill my inbox twice as fast (already many GB)
I am trying to avoid going into the spam folder when I send an email to users on my website.
Mainly I need them to activate their newly registered account and if it's in the spam folder, they most likely will never activate it.
I noticed that for the most part, it's Hotmail that blocks my emails.
I read a lot that the more people mark it as not-spam, and if they add the email to their contacts, that why it increases the chances of not going to spam folders in the future.
Is there a way to offer a link for "add this email to your contacts" in the html body of the email?
Also, what can I do to not get to the spam in general? I tried stripping all the html and just send plain text but still went to spam...
To prevent your emails from going to spam can entail optimizing a number of things such as
Text of the email (even if it's plain text.. spammy/salesy wording will still trigger spam
The domain in which your sending the email from
Whether or not your sending domain is authenticated (e.g. SPF, DKIM)
Checking that your not on spam lists
What people usually do is create a link to a page which provides step by step instructions on how users can whitelist the sender in various email clients and providers.
This website will actually auto-generate the instructions page for you: http://www.emaildeliveryjedi.com/email-whitelist.php
Mailchimp offers a solution which allows you to add an 'Add-to-Address-Book' link to your campaigns but it's not very broadly compatible with all clients. What they're doing is embedded hcard microdata.
Further:
Mailchimp Add-to-Address-Book Links
hCard
I'd recommend sending a test email to http://isnotspam.com/
They run a SpamAssassin test (and a few others) on the email and give you an output, which is a good metric to judge most spam filters by.
Another thing to look out for is that GMail's doesn't like when you mention money at all, especially large amounts.
My Mailchimp blocks sending the e-mails after I imported a larger number of e-mails.
I still have enough space of e-mails left but when I try sending the mail I get the following error:
List
MailChimp's artificial intelligence system, Omnivore, automatically scanned your recent import. Omnivore detected that abuse rates for the campaign will exceed industry thresholds. This needs to be resolved before we can support sending to this list.
To resolve this, we must ask that the list data be removed and reconfirmed through a verifiable process. Once this is done, the campaign can be replicated and resent.
But I can not resend to all my clients a subscriber link!
How can I solve this error so I can finally send e-mails again?
Maybe you've alrady solved this, but if not, or anyone struggling with this...
I had the same problem. My solution (after contact with MailChimp support):
Delete all imported emails from the list.
Your Campaign probably still won't send, with same error, so:
Replicate the campaign. The new one will now be able to send.
This worked for me. If not for you, maybe the contact I had with the Compliance Team of Mailchimp was the solution and they confirmed my deleting of the emails. So email and stalk them.
The main issue for the blocking by Omnivore, was probably the amount of info# and ofice# addresses in the import list. At least delete ALL of those before import.
Cheers,
Richard
I tried to import a larget list of subscribers. I eventually figured out that I had to split the CSV file into multiple CSV files with a maximum of 200 entries (subscriber rows) in each for Omnivore to stop complaining.
CSV Splitter (free Windows program) did the trick of splitting my large CSV into smaller chunks.
Before importing, I verified the email addreses in the subscriber list using Free Email Verifier (free online tool), as Omnivore might be cheching for non-existing email adresses.
It might also be unhappy of role based email addresses like postmaster#example.com, but then you will get a notification with a link to display the problematic email address(es).
MailChimp's Omnivore spam filter throws lots of false positives. Unfortunately, they don't check their compliance questionnaires in a timely manner.
Sending an email to Compliance#mailchimp.com is your best bet.
I'm making a quick Google App Engine program that presents a publicly available form that users can fill out with their name and email address, then can enter a friend's name and e-mail address. The application pulls in the data via POST, then sends a pre-formatted e-mail like 'Hi, , your friend wants to invite you...'
What should I be doing to prevent spammers from exploiting this publicly facing e-mail sending program? Is there a good resource for best-practices in this field? I've spent a few hours searching, but I haven't really found anything definitive...
Principally creating a publicly available form that anyone can use to send[s] a pre-formatted e-mail is another name for creating a spam machine.
You can mitigate by making it harder for non-humans to use it, recaptcha is the typical way to achieve this.
You could send a confirmation email to the sender and require a secondary action (like clicking a link) before sending the email. Or, if you expect your users to return, ask them to sign up (with a similar confirmation) before allowing them to send email.
I would first impose some limit to the # of email addresses a specific user/IP can send. This won't solve the problem but will limit the damage in case someone does try to send spam to 1000 emails.
Second, you could try sending the emails in small batches if an user puts in a lot of email addresses. Send 5 at a time, and monitor to see if there's any spam complaints (you can probably automate this somehow). If no complaints after 2 days, keep sending the rest.
I'm working on an application that will allow management to send registered users (opt-in) broadcast emails at regular intervals, or based on various other criteria. In any case, I'm curious as to whether I should send a separate email to each recipient or bcc all of them on a single message. Currently the email list would be about 1500 recipients, but it should scale all the way up to at least 25k without problems.
Thoughts? Am I getting into a range that I need to worry about being put on spam lists?
Yes, I've had spam list problem with mailing lists of that size, managing email lists for non-profits.
One wants to take extra precautions: make sure your email has SPF records, write a script to send the emails in batches, paced out over time. Definitely send them one one at a time, not as bcc, as direct mail has a better chance of arriving. Make it very easy to unsubscribe. Include people's subscribed email in the message sent -- often people have email forwarded to another account and then try to unsubscribe that account and get frustrated.
Even so, don't be surprised if you have to change your IP at some point.
You are getting into that range. This is the point where I would look to get a third party to send the email on my behalf. Let them worry about being marked as spammers, supply the bandwidth, etc.
I recently built an application with those same criteria. We do the emailing in-house, and send one email to each recipient.
Do use domain keys signing or be sure to use SPF records for your domain. We didn't do that at first, and were blacklisted by a number of different ISPs. Fortunately, it is fairly easy to get them to unblock you. Most will include an online form you can fill out or an email address you can use in the server bounce message.
Don't try to implement the actual email sending yourself. That's a huge waste of time. Either outsource the entire process to one of the many reputable vendors out there (Many organizations I deal with use Constant Contact, and it works well), or run a garden-variety mailing list server (e.g. Mailman) in-house.
Either way, take efforts to make it very easy to unsubscribe (good vendors have that covered), to authenticate that messages are from your company, and to show that your company is not spamming. Real mailing list server software supports all of these goals, by adding proper headers that identify the source very clearly and making unsubscription easy. For instance, Gmail will now offer to send unsubscribe requests in response to mailing list messages marked as 'spam', as has AOL for a long time.
Definitely set up SPF and DKIM if you can manage it.
Finally, whatever you do, make sure you keep logs of your subscriptions, so that if someone does accuse you of spamming, you can defend yourself.
The task is mostly uninteresting on a strictly technical level. You should worry about what happens when a recipient thinks that your list's content is spam and starts (a) complaining or (b) flagging the message as spam with one or more anti-spam service providers. Something like this is bound to happen with a list of the size you describe.
If you are prepared and have the time handle such cases, go for it, at least for a start. (Changing your mail server's IP address as Devin Ceartas suggests won't be of much use by the way.)
If you want to build your own thing, I have two pieces of advice:
Unsubscribing has to be easy, no more than one or two clicks. Using Mailman or any other mailing list manager that was intended for discussion mailing lists is asking for trouble.
BCCing the same message to 1500 (or 25k) recipients may take some load off your mail server, but it has one serious disadvantage: You won't be able to use VERP in order to determine if all addresses that have once been subscribed to your list are still valid. (Large mail providers tend to classify messages as spam if there are delivery attempts to many invalid addresses.)