Sending the same e-mail to 9,000 customers at once?

Hi CroonerBill and welcome to Fluther. Unless you have a good system in place to prove that all the customers on your mailing list opted in to getting occasional emails about specials and such, it’s best to sign up for an email service like Constant Contact, iContact or Vertical Response so you don’t run afoul of the Can Spam Act and get your email account or IP address blocked.

For those receving this e-mail it isn’t spam. They actually need my product for their administrative documents.

I get email from lots of companies I deal with. When new software or specific types of hardware developments occur, I want to know. There are also lots of political issues I follow.

Not all emails from businesses or organizations are spam, just the ones that are unsolicited and from people you never opted into receiving email from. And any good email marketing program should include, in the body of each email, a way to unsubscribe, Our business and personal interests change from time to time, and we should be able to cut ties with business or political emailers who no longer interest us.

I assume you have all the customers stored in a database, so you could write a program that reads 400 entries from the database, sends the mass email, and then reads the next 400, and the next, until done.

You can do it through MailChimp.com

An easy, blazing fast way to do it if you have shell access to a working, valid postfix or maybe sendmail server. To do just one msg:

1) Form your message in a text file (say, msg.txt; not sure the trailing dot is necessary, but I always use it; it should be obvious what you need to change on each line):

From: B Werk <bolwerk@anus.gov>
Reply-To: <bolwerk@anus.gov>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.2.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Schitt Romney <president@merkin.gov>
Subject: Hello

This is a Test

This is another paragraph.

Etc.
.

2) Simply pipe the output to sendmail -t like so:

cat msg.txt | sendmail -t

Or, to do it remotely over ssh with:

cat localmsg.txt | ssh yourusername@remote.host.gov “sendmail -t”

The second option is still blazing fast compared to SMTP. I’ve also done it from Windows using putty‘s plink program.

3) Here is the “hard” part. You have to write a fairly trivial PERL script to do the task repetitively. I wrote one once, but I lost it in a hard drive failure. With a little more effort, it’s not hard to do a multipart HTML/plaintext script or even include UUencoded attachments.

I also did it with Windows PowerShell and ASP.NET before by injecting a simple PERL script into a remote ssh server.

Here is a sending subroutine in PERL that might work.

sub sendmsg
{
$msg = “From: $_[0]\n”;
$msg .= “Subject: $_[1]\n”;
$msg .= “MIME-Version: 1.0\n”;
$msg .= “To: $_[2]”;
$msg .= ”\n\n”;
$msg .= $_[3];

open SPOOLER, ”| sendmail -t” or die “Could not open”;
print SPOOLER ”$msg”;
close SPOOLER or die “bad spool: $! $?”;
}

sendmsg($from,$subject,$i,$body);

$body can be fully formed message.

You’ll need to set up ssh properly to allow passwordless communication, but I think you can do it from a remote machine (e.g., a home computer) by changing this line

open SPOOLER, ”| sendmail -t” or die “Could not open”;

to

open SPOOLER, ”| ssh whoever@foreign.machine.gov sendmail -t” or die “Could not open”;

The catch is the administrator of your mail sever will need to allow it. But, like I said, it’s blazing fast. A simple loop through your user database would probably get all the messages to the mail server in seconds. At that point, the mail server can take its sweet time sending them and your job is done.