Mass mailing HTML-newsletter in Asp.Net

Question

Hi,

I'm developing a site where I need to send HTML newsletters to a mailing-list.

I have build a html frame where I have my "View in browser" and "Unsubscrib" links (which of cause will vary). In the admin module, I post html and uploads images for the html-newsletter. Is this a good way to do it?

How should I send the e-mails the XX.XXX persons? I can't use BCC because the unsubscribe link will vary. So I guess I have to sendt all the e-mails seperately. But the code shall be fault tollerant so only half get the newsletter if there is a error.

Best regards, Lasse

Answer 1

yes you will need to send the emails one by one if you want a unique unsubscribe link for each client. you may send the same email to everyone if you put a textbox on the page where people can unsubscribe by typing in their emails.

as for the email being sent out, you have the right idea. you need to host the images on your server and call these from you html.

the html must be basic html 3.0 or something of the sort. this will ensure that most email clients will properly render your email.

be extra careful when making a mailing list, it can be very easy to get banned from certain servers such as google or hotmail.

Answer 2

Hope these are helpfull:

1. Use MailDefinition as a templating engine http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.webcontrols.maildefinition.aspx If your numbers are large you may look into not using SMTP as a transport protocol, but rather generating files for each email you wish to send and then putting them directly into the "Drop" folder of your SMTP server. Mirosoft SMTP Server allows this quite easily.

2. Use a unique bounce back email address for each email (but include a reply-to to a real address, such as office (at) yourdomain.com. Let those bounce back email addresses point to one common account and after sending your newsletter remove all addresses that bounced from your database.

3. As for fault tolerance, I don't think I quite understand. Why would you only want half to ge the newsletter? I would catch any server related issues and stop the processing immediately, and any client related issues (client's email does not work, see 2.) are either skipped and logged (if detected during processing) or processed later (if detected later).

4. Depending on your local laws check opt-in/opt-out policies.

5. Also take a look at embedding images directly into the html (a not well known fact is that you can embed images directly into ) this will usually make email size larger but it will let Outlook display those images directly without going to your server. Of course if you want newsletter tracking via an image beacon or similar then server images are what you want.

6. Of course check all common email clients for correct display. AFAIK it is almost impossible to send a format that each and every client will display correctly unless you send plain text :)