On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Port Able <ablep...@yahoo.com> wrote: > I am currently consulting for a small retailer. They have been using an > online email service provider for the past few years to blast personalized > emails to their customers (opt-in, and 100-200 thousand emails at a time). > They have asked me to see if we can install an email server in house to > accomplish the same thing and eliminate the monthly costs. I am fairly > familiar with Linux/Unix and with databases (mysql and postgresql). I have > not done anything with Sendmail or Postfix but feel comfortable following > the documentation. I have also ordered the two books that I could find on > Postfix. > > My questions are: has anyone used Postfix for this purpose? Do the online > ESP's develop their own email servers? Do any of them use Sendmail, Postfix > or qmail? > > Thanks in advance for any information or links.
I've not used mailmain or ezmlm for this purpose, but so called "mailing list software" that's available as open source is often meant to be used for having discussions with numerous people through email. Using systems like that as a bulk mailer is generally a really bad idea and requires a lot of intricate configuration to ensure no one can reply to the whole list, etc... To accomplish this in my company, I setup postfix as the mail relay server, and use GroupMail 5 (http://www.group-mail.com/asp/common/default.asp) [1] as the sending client. Groupmail manages the lists and provides a nice "Windows" front-end for whoever is doing the sending. GroupMail isn't free, but we've been using the Personal Edition and it has enough features to meet our needs. One of the biggest issues you're going to run into is that your IPs might get labeled as a spammer, even though this is opt-in. Dealing with that can be a big headache and is generally what you pay the monthly fee for. Sending legitimate bulk email is not a simple matter of hitting "Send" -- you also need to deal with the multiple issues that come up when doing it. This is the value that the other company brings to the table. [1] I have no affiliation with GroupMail 5.
