Mass emailing users of a rails app

Question

I have a rails app that just launched and I have over a thousand users signed up to the site. We are interested in keeping in contact with the community through email newsletters. We have been using a third party tool and migrating the email addresses from one database to another. Is there an easier way to do this from rails? I am open to suggestions.

Answer 1

You can simply loop through all the emails and send individual emails. It's pretty simple using rails and there are tutorials everywhere.

You could also use the third party API to add automatically your users emails to their database. If you could provide the third party you're using, I could maybe give you more information.

Some newsletter website give you the option to add emails directly in their system via a given form. Why not use this form? You would put it somewhere on the website and the system will add the new emails to the third party software and not to yours. Of course this only works if you have a "enter your email here to subscribe" kind of logic.

Answer 2

If you really, absolutely, definitely need to send to these emails yourself, and you're dealing with a larger user base, you'd probably want to go through a distributed setup employing something like Starling, RabbitMQ, or the all-new Resque to distribute the task of sending these emails across a multitude of workers.

It's a topic far from trivial, so all in all I'd recommend using an external service provider for this.

Answer 3

Use ActionMailer to generate emails from templates (views) using Erb. I would do this unless you wish track clickthroughs back to your site from those mails, then you may be better of using a third party.

As an aside (I'm sure you know this but), be aware that you'll need to inform your ISP and demonstrate to them that you have permission from your users to send these emails, else they may block you from sending without warning.

Answer 4

http://github.com/adzap/ar_mailer

ar_mailer will allow you to queue up mail and send it out over time so you don't violate any mail rules put in place by your host.