[thelist] SENDING NEWSLETTERS

[Martyn Haigh]

I've been having problems with sending out newsletters too.

I have a database of around 8000 people whom I'm obliged to send a
newsletter to every now and again.  I found that using a normal ASP Email
solution (CDONTS) just didn't work.  I have never used JMail or ASPEMail,
but I would imagine that they would present the same problems :

When you have a lot of users the ASP script you use tends to stop working,
in my case it would send email to every 50th person - obviously no good!

It all depends if you want to pay money for it or not.  I got recommended
this piece of software which I have used several times now without any
problem (and it's not too expensive) : http://www.infacta.com/gm.asp

Just a note : if you ever do send out emails, make sure that users have a
way of unsubscribing with out having to enter their emails addresses again -
just create a link they can click.  I say this as many companies who do spam
people pretend to have an unsubscribe function on their site where you enter
your email address - where in fact it just adds you to more lists. Nasty!

Hope some of this helps!

Martyn Haigh

Site Developer
The Virgin Cosmetics Company
City Fields, Chichester, West Sussex PO20 2FP
tel: 01243 622282



-----Original Message-----
From: Administrative HQ [mailto:english_offline at yahoo.com]
Sent: 18 December 2002 17:05
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: [thelist] SENDING NEWSLETTERS

Hello.

I have a really dumb question, but I've never put out
a newsletter before and have obligated myself to my
users to do so (for better or for worse).

The first question that comes up is how to do it. I
can use Jmail or ASPEmail from the site's user dbase,
but these methods seem pretty cumbersome, coding every
line break, etc - especially because some of the
information is in other languages which are very hard
to work with using these methods. There seems to be
plenty of software on offer to handle these things
(any suggestions? Should allow defining charset and
content transfer encoding). In short, what's the best
way to do it?

The second question is that a friend of mine told me
he tried to send out a newsletter and was <gulp>
immediatley cut off by his ISP for spamming</gulp>.
Everyone sends these, so I assume there's more to the
story than what he told me OR that he did something
wrong. I would think I could do this with no problem,
provided I include a link for a user who wants to opt
out. Can anyone explain the ins and outs of this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

David

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