Need help creating a mass email program

Question

Hello everyone. New to the forum but love the comments. I'm tech savvy but not when it comes to programming, coding etc. So - I guess that makes me tech stupid for the moment.

Basically - I want to create a mass email program that will allow us to send bulk emails to our customers who signed an email slip. Currently - we're at 100,000 or so in our database but we expect to see this rise to 200,000 at some point.

What is the best script language to use for this? Is PHP going to be handle this many emails? What is the most emails that I can send in any one batch for it to still be "safe" so that the emails arrive to the proper recipients? What is the term when you send directly from the server?

We currently have 3 servers and I'm assuming they are capable of doing this no problem...but I haven't spoken to our webhosting company just yet.

Lastly - I put together a powerpoint...that gives specs - is there anyone here that would be interested in a little side work to do the project? Really interested in the feedback. Thanks.

Answer 1

It depends on how you do this. You can:

1) loop and send 100 000 individual mail

2) Send 1 email with 100 000 people in BCC

or mix both. php can handle it well, but it's a huge task on the mail server.

Answer 2

Step 1. Acquire a real email server.
Step 2. Utilize said email server by having your scripts send the mail to it for delivery, and not directly.
Step 3. Throttle the mail server as necessary
Step 4. Monitor the non-delivery reports and remove addresses as necessary...

Answer 3

In general and based off what you said -- do not create your own mass email program.

Use a service, such as MailChimp or iContact.

Here's a small list of some of the things they do for you:

1. Manage the list
2. Handle unsubscriptions
3. Handle soft bounced emails
4. Handle hard bounced emails
5. Handle white listing (You have to pay third party companies $$$s a month to be on these lists)
6. Give you an idea of how likely and spammy your email is
7. How fast your email can be sent out (AOL will put you on their blacklist if you send out too fast)
8. Handle Analytics (such as how many were opened, when, where, what links were clicked on, linking to Google Analytics)
9. Handle multiple lists and variable replacement (such as "Dear _")
10. Nice, easy-to-use interface.

Again, that's a small list in the scheme of things. Those were off the top of my head without too much thought.

---

EDIT

A couple big advantages I didn't mention:

a) Support
b) A community
c) Constant improvements
d) No server-management