I am helping a Los Angeles choreographer to transition away from sending her announcements via Entourage.
Here's the situation: She has multiple conact groups, and sends classes and performance announcements several times a month, to different groups.
She manages the contact groups manually. The group size is between 1500 and 2500 people.
Recently verizon blocked her outgoing port 25, presumably for spam activity. Again, her contacts are interested in the content.
She is aware of mailchimp, constantcontact etc. but would like to be able to send the email via her email software and not have to create a newsletter for every single mailing. Also, she's very short on $$.
So, what would be the best way to set up a system allowing her to send announcements from Entourage, with attached images, to her lists, without having Entourage send every single email?
I am thinking of setting up a set of mailing lists, each corresponding to one of her groups. I have never set up a mailing list before and am wondering if it's possible to have a list accept emails from only one person (Admin) and distribute them to the group?
Recipients should be able to unsubscribe easily, and by default reply to her but not the list. She should be the only one able to use the list for distribution, and should be able to send messages (with attachments) directly from her email client without modification.
Is this possible? Where can I find step-by-step instructions? What are best practices to avoid her domain being blacklisted? What's the easiest way to convert her contact groups to mailing list subscribers?
I am helping her for free, so the simpler the better :)
Thank you!
UPDATE: She has a standard linux hosting account allowing her to run php etc. And, ideally, the emails would come from her personally or at least from her domain name.
Does she have web hosting? If so, PHPList is a decent piece of software that allows you to create and manage multiple lists, save message templates, and throttle outgoing messages to appease spam blockers.
I believe Google Groups will accomplish all of your requirements.
http://groups.google.com
Related
There is a game that currently is played on standalone computers.
I want to create an add-on that allows the players to interconnect. For that I think XMPP seems to be a suitable platform.
The messages that shall be exchanged is presence/roster so users can find each other, structures messages to send items or money and generic text messages for comment and fun. In later versions I'd like to experiment with some 'business logic' to send out global changes for the world or missions and such.
My question is how users get hooked up to each other. Imagine someone creates an XMPP account. How does he start meeting the others?
Or, in general how would the users see each other if they have independent accounts? Should they all join one first multi-user-chat? Should there be one monitoring component to send invites and update rosters?
If, inside the game players can enter different areas, would it make sense to have one multi-user-chat per game area?
I know these are many questions but maybe from them you get the design problem I am facing, and I'd be happy to get some clues how this could get implemented.
Meanwhile I found the answer.
The game acts as XMPP client. It sill connect automatically to a multi-user-chat that is hardcoded in the game. With the correct parameters given, the XMPP server will create the chat room on the first user to connect. Subsequent users will simply join the same room.
This given, every user will automatically receive presence messages for all users in that room. From this the client knows the other player's addresses and can send messages to specific players. Messages addressed to the room will automatically be relayed to all other users.
So the problem I saw above is actually very easy to solve within XMPP.
What are the best practices for sending system message/s to group/ user, while using XMPP protocol? All the users at at the group should receive the message.
How can I achieve it?
Possible solutions that might be useful:
The announce - I have encountered with the announce and more
specifically this module.
Publish-Subscribe http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html
There is always the
option of creating an admin user that will send messages.
Thanks in advance.
The best approach depends on your constrain and especially if you control the client. For example, if you use a client you did not develop, it may not render the pubsub messages fine.
The second thing to consider if how are the group defined. Are users registering for alerts ? In that case in seems to match the pubsub case. Otherwise, if groups are not too large, you may use an admin user to send to the list of user you want. You can even send a single message to multiple users using XEP-0033: Extended Stanza Addressing (Sometimes called "multicast").
mod_announce can only target all users or all online users, so it does not seem to match your need in terms of "groups".
I explained most of the option in a talk (video and slides): https://blog.process-one.net/implementing-state-of-the-art-one-to-many-chat-services-with-ejabberd-ejabberd-workshop-1/
It is broader as it not only cover broadcast but also groupchat, but it should help clarifying your choice.
I am currently developing an email server in C, and the end goal is to be able to send millions of emails to millions of people every day. Many organizations have email lists with large numbers of users that they email every week/month/etc.
The big question: how can I prevent the server and the emails from being marked as a spam? All of the SPAM-prevention stuff I've seen so far deals mostly with poor configurations, or at least does not require large numbers of emails to be send every hour. I have yet to see anything that addresses the scope of millions-of-emails-per-hour.
Here are some assumptions you can make:
EVERY single email sent is legitimate
all SPF records and MX records are accurate, up-to-date, and valid
all other common SPAM-prevention tactics are being used (reverse DNS is good, DKIM is used, return-addresses are valid, etc etc etc)
emails are one-to-one (ie, I'm not CC'ing 1000 gmail addresses; I'm sending one email to each address)
Here are some questions to get us moving in the right direction:
should I limit the number of emails sent to X emails per minute per domain? If so, how do sites like GMail and MailChimp get around this? note: there are no ISP restrictions; this is only an issue for the receiving mail server...
should I limit the number of connections to a domain at a given time? (eg, will Google think I'm a spam agent if I open 10/100/1000 simultaneous connections to gmail servers?)
how many bounce-backs (5xx errors on an address) should I accept for automatically removing that email from a subscription list? does this affect a server's spam rating?
is there anything else I should or should not do?
Final note: please remember this is a programming question, NOT a library question - I don't want to use someone else's service; we are writing our own for a reason. I'm looking for practical programming advice.
This is not a programming question, but here goes:
I strongly recommend you join your local mail operators mailing list, as well as "Spam-L" mailing list. Read the archives, and see what issues others are having.
The short answer is that destination servers can, and do, use all sorts of methods to try to prevent spam. THere are many things you will need to be aware of in order to have good deliverability, and those things change all the time.
First and most important, remember:
Free speech also includes free listening.
Nobody has to accept or transmit your mail.
Independent operators, businesses and individuals have a perfect right to refuse your mail for any reason or no reason. ISPs are limited only by their contracts with the customer and common-carrier laws, which generally give them broad discretion in what is considered spam and how they block it.
Their system, their rules. If you want your messages delivered, you must cooperate with receiving ISPs. This may mean jumping through hoops, or complying with requirements you think are stupid, or pointless.
Ensure you are not listed by SpamHaus. Most ISPs small and large use SpamHaus DNSBL service. Presence on one of SpamHaus' lists asserts their opinion that your mail meets their listing criteria. Because of SpamHaus' high reputation, most ISPs will simply block all mail you send based on their opinion.
Make sure you process unsubscribes.
Make sure you process non-delivery reports. You may not want to kill a subscription on the first NDR, as there can be intermittent network or server problems which can result in non-delivery, or even erroneous reports that an address is incorrect. But if you get several over the course of a month or two with no successful deliveries, you should kill the subscription.
Join a pay-for reputation service. These may require posting a bond which you may lose if you send Spam. SpamHaus offer one. There are others.
Get professional advice from someone like Return-Path. You will have to pay for this also.
Monitor. The hoops you have to jump through change all the time. Ensure you are aware of emerging deliverability problems.
Join feedback loops. most large ISPs offer feedback programmes where you can get feedback on how users are perceiving your mail, whether they are reporting it as spam, etc.
Ben had some good practical advice, but for others with this problem, here is what I have discovered in the past month:
Email is all about REPUTATION. You will never be able to throw together a server, ip, and/or domain name and expect to be able to send out millions upon millions of emails.
On Stack Overflow, we have a rating system (up and downvotes) to estimate the value/trust that person has with the SO community. But it takes time and effort to get points. It's the same with email - you have to start sending out small amounts of email that people actually open up and read (and would never mark as spam), and then slowly send out more and more every month until you reach the goal of millions and millions of emails.
Everytime someone "downvotes" - marks the email as spam, flags the domain, flags the ip address, deletes the email without reading it, etc - you get a hit against your reputation. You need to be continually monitoring and putting effort and best-practices into your reputation if you want to gain good standing with people.
So start small, expand in a stable and steady manner, and always keep a watchful eye out for abuse, misuses, good and bad feedback, or anything else that might affect your reputation.
It's not only possible, but very practical; you just need to give it time and effort.
I am creating a PHP system that will forward emails, (ie. someone#emailforprofession.com to someone#gmail.com) without using an SMTP server which is faster and more stable? PEAR::Mail or PHP: Mail? (or another one entirely)
I would be using extra headers and attachments but mainly trying to keep it looking and acting the same. (if anyone has an example for forwarding with attachments PLEASE provide it!)
And not exactly on the side but is there a way for people to be able to send email from they're someone#emailforprofession.com email address without having a complete inbox etc?
It would probably be better for me to use a real email provider but these are supposed to be free email addresses so paying by the email address is not an option, if anyone knows of a service that: charges by the month or year, has an API that email addresses can be created from and that can set up email forwards via the API that would be most appreciated.
I currently have a partial system together but would like to know which way I should go first.
Thank you all.
The PEAR class supports multiple mailer backends, which allows you to
switch whenever needed and you'll be able to perform some benchmarks
and see which backend suits you best. The native mail function on the
other hand is much less advanced and will show a clear difference in
performance, especially for that amount of mails.
I also suggest you have a look at PEAR's mail queue class:
http://pear.php.net/package/Mail_Queue
This is much more recommended for larger projects such as yours,
you'll also be able to implement a cron like feature which will send a
certain amount of mail per period you choose.
Here
we've got different processes that send mails in case of issues encountered (e.g. not enough permissions to perform an operation on a certain order item). This works fine to the point that sometimes identical messages are sent every 5 minutes. In our environment it is very difficult to synchronize the email sending on application layer (actually there are different applications sending out email, so we'd have to touch every application if we were to implement this inside application layer).
It would seem logical for me that filtering out mails (by duplicate subjects) is best done within the email layer, e.g. the application receiving the SMTP requests.
Yet we'd also prefer not to go down to SMTP layer by ourselves, rather use an existing service/application.
Is anybody aware of a web mailer (like googlemail) which does this kind of filtering? it would be ok for us the pay for such a service, so being "free as in beer" would be nice, but being not free is not a showstopper.
Thanks in advance
Holger
I find the idea of filtering duplicate e-mail message by the Subject: header quite worrisome. If they are produced by multiple applications, how can you be certain that the content of the messages is duplicated and that you are not unwittingly dropping important notifications?
The only unique feature of a message that can be used to filter out duplicates is its Message-ID: header. If that header is the same for two messages, then it's usually reasonable to assume that they are copies of the same original message - e.g. one received directly and one that was CC'ed to a mailing list.
That said, you can do pretty much anything you want on most SMTP servers - at least those that are based on a Unix-like OS. For example, Postfix can use custom shell scripts for filtering.
You can, for example, use formail to extract the body of each message and produce its
MD5 hash. Comparing the message body hashes along with the Date:, Subject:, From:, To: and Cc: headers at the same time is a good start to detect real duplicates.