RE: Mass emailing?
1000 really isn't much if the messages are small. You could create another SMTP queue that has connection limits so messages will trickle out slower. (Exchange will try to blast them all out at once by default). Someone will mention Blat too. That can help in feeding the messages slower too. I've done about 20,000 in a day without problems... on a 1.5 T1. You could even script something that slowly drops messages in the pickup folder I suppose... -Original Message- From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 12:41 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Mass emailing? For a one-time mailing? Use blat.exe - it's a nice tool that you can put in a 'for' loop, and run it against a text file with your customer emails in it. On Feb 7, 2008 10:29 AM, Steve Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We're a printing company and we're facing a large increase in the price of paper, which is huge compenent of our costing. Our sales department has asked me to come up with a way to send an email to about 1000 of our biggest customers, explaining the increase and the price increases that will result. The recipients are all existing customers, but I'm concerned nonetheless with running afoul of spam lists and such. Is there a commonly accepted way to do this? We're on Exchange 2007. Steve ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
RE: Mass emailing?
Take a look at GroupMail Pro. The outbound message traffic can be staggered so you're not blasting constantly. Roger Wright Network Administrator Evatone, Inc. 727.572.7076 x388 Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on.- Winston Churchill -Original Message- From: Steve Hart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 1:30 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Mass emailing? We're a printing company and we're facing a large increase in the price of paper, which is huge compenent of our costing. Our sales department has asked me to come up with a way to send an email to about 1000 of our biggest customers, explaining the increase and the price increases that will result. The recipients are all existing customers, but I'm concerned nonetheless with running afoul of spam lists and such. Is there a commonly accepted way to do this? We're on Exchange 2007. Steve ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
Re: Mass emailing?
Unless you have a *very* sanitized mailing list and more than a T1 worth of bandwidth, I would expect sending out a mass mailing like that to have a good change of bringing down your Internet line and/or your SMTP virtual server, depending on your bandwidth and how 'clean' your mailing list is. Look up Constant Contact, and mention to Nancy Freitag that Connor referred you. They do an amazing job. All they do are (verified, non-spam) mass mailing, and are extremely professional. -- Durf On Feb 7, 2008 1:29 PM, Steve Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We're a printing company and we're facing a large increase in the price of paper, which is huge compenent of our costing. Our sales department has asked me to come up with a way to send an email to about 1000 of our biggest customers, explaining the increase and the price increases that will result. The recipients are all existing customers, but I'm concerned nonetheless with running afoul of spam lists and such. Is there a commonly accepted way to do this? We're on Exchange 2007. Steve ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~ -- -- Give a man a match, and he'll be warm for a minute. But set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life. ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
RE: Mass emailing?
Just to throw a name out there, I know a few people that run small business that use a service called 'MyEmma' http://www.myemma.com/ Great for creating newsletters and mailings... From: Durf [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 1:49 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Mass emailing? Unless you have a *very* sanitized mailing list and more than a T1 worth of bandwidth, I would expect sending out a mass mailing like that to have a good change of bringing down your Internet line and/or your SMTP virtual server, depending on your bandwidth and how 'clean' your mailing list is. Look up Constant Contact, and mention to Nancy Freitag that Connor referred you. They do an amazing job. All they do are (verified, non-spam) mass mailing, and are extremely professional. -- Durf On Feb 7, 2008 1:29 PM, Steve Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We're a printing company and we're facing a large increase in the price of paper, which is huge compenent of our costing. Our sales department has asked me to come up with a way to send an email to about 1000 of our biggest customers, explaining the increase and the price increases that will result. The recipients are all existing customers, but I'm concerned nonetheless with running afoul of spam lists and such. Is there a commonly accepted way to do this? We're on Exchange 2007. Steve ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ -- -- Give a man a match, and he'll be warm for a minute. But set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life. ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
Re: Mass emailing?
For a one-time mailing? Use blat.exe - it's a nice tool that you can put in a 'for' loop, and run it against a text file with your customer emails in it. On Feb 7, 2008 10:29 AM, Steve Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We're a printing company and we're facing a large increase in the price of paper, which is huge compenent of our costing. Our sales department has asked me to come up with a way to send an email to about 1000 of our biggest customers, explaining the increase and the price increases that will result. The recipients are all existing customers, but I'm concerned nonetheless with running afoul of spam lists and such. Is there a commonly accepted way to do this? We're on Exchange 2007. Steve ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
RE: Mass emailing?
We're a printing company and we're facing a large increase in the price of paper, which is huge compenent of our costing. Our sales department has asked me to come up with a way to send an email to about 1000 of our biggest customers, explaining the increase and the price increases that will result. The recipients are all existing customers, but I'm concerned nonetheless with running afoul of spam lists and such. Is there a commonly accepted way to do this? The technology isn't necessarily the biggest problem. Managing the sending rate can useful but not totally necessary though, some good methods have been suggested. Keep in mind that with the built in queuing that's part of smtp it's perfectly fine to have mail back up a little bit on its way out. If recipients systems have limits on the connection rate they will just throttle and eventually it'll go out. Things like having your reverse dns set up correctly and not on consumer spans of IP address will help deliverability as can making an entry in the Spamhaus PBL http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/index.lasso The bigger problem is how you've collected the email addresses. If it's all double opt-in then you're golden. If it was collected over the years on paper or by other means (non-verified) with some kind of understanding, then you might run afoul of some of those people who may complain to various block lists. I would suggest having a serious talk with the person who will be writing the copy and suggest to them to have a good introductory paragraph that explains how/where the addresses were acquired and that this is nothing more than a periodic mailing that may be of interest. Also state how they may remove themselves from future. Managing the relationship and good will with the customer is essential! It is of utmost importance to offer and follow through on unsubscribes and also keep track of invalid/bounced addresses so that you may cleanse the list. The following page has some general guidelines: http://www.mail-abuse.com/an_listmgntgdlines.html Along with What Counts, I can recommend Constant Contact if the company would like to start really managing their marketing email. These types of managed email marketing providers come at not a small cost; however, you may be able to build a business case to get the budget. ~JasonG -- ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
Re: Mass emailing?
On Feb 7, 2008 2:49 PM, Durf [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unless you have a *very* sanitized mailing list and more than a T1 worth of bandwidth, I would expect sending out a mass mailing like that to have a good change of bringing down your Internet line and/or your SMTP virtual server, depending on your bandwidth and how 'clean' your mailing list is. I've had occasion twice over the past six months to send out a mass mailing to about 360 addresses. We've got a fixed-wireless feed we use for SMTP and VPN. 512 Kbit/sec CIR, 1.5 Mbit/sec MIR. I just dumped the message body into Sendmail on our Linux Internet gateway (rather than going through our Exchange server first). All but about 15 addresses were delivered (or bounced) in under 15 minutes; the rest were in queue for later retry due to unreachable servers. That's with no special planning/configuration, and regular SMTP and VPN traffic still going. While 1000 is obviously almost three times as many recipients, I'm still surprised to hear Exchange on a full T1 would fold under the load. Are you sure of that? -- Ben ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
RE: Mass emailing?
We regularly email to around 3000 members of our organization. Normally we use MS Word to create a mail merge from an Excel spreadsheet of addresses. They all go out over our 512K pipe in about an hour or two. We consider 40k the size limit that bogs down our internet connection. But we target for messages under 30K. We limit connections to 10per domain to keep *some* spam engines from flagging the message as bulk, and we limit the number of concurrent connections overall to 20 to keep the pipe from filling up. Since we use a mail merge, the emails usually aren't the same, so most SPAM filters usually aren't triggered by *that*. If you aren't sending more than a couple of addresses in any particular domain, you aren't likely to trigger spam traps based on it simply being bulk. We used to just BCC the addresses by copying and pasting addresses from excel, but that flagged us as spam from all the domains that had more than a few recipients. We track all our bounces and usually stay under 4%. For you, that would only be about 40 folks to check up on. Of course, we don't get bounces from most emails that are tagged as spam and just dropped. But we feel we have a pretty good penetration. However, unless you request a response or use a service that can track when the emails are opened, you won't really know how many actually get slurped up by spam filters. Based on our experiences, limiting the connections and using a mail merge had measurable increase in delivery rates. Bill Songstad -Original Message- From: Steve Hart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 10:30 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Mass emailing? We're a printing company and we're facing a large increase in the price of paper, which is huge compenent of our costing. Our sales department has asked me to come up with a way to send an email to about 1000 of our biggest customers, explaining the increase and the price increases that will result. The recipients are all existing customers, but I'm concerned nonetheless with running afoul of spam lists and such. Is there a commonly accepted way to do this? We're on Exchange 2007. Steve ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
RE: Mass emailing?
Exchange can handle millions of messages per day. Easily. It might easily eat up all your bandwidth though, but you can throttle that usage to some degree. Regards, Michael B. Smith MCSE/Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com -Original Message- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:22 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Mass emailing? On Feb 7, 2008 2:49 PM, Durf [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unless you have a *very* sanitized mailing list and more than a T1 worth of bandwidth, I would expect sending out a mass mailing like that to have a good change of bringing down your Internet line and/or your SMTP virtual server, depending on your bandwidth and how 'clean' your mailing list is. I've had occasion twice over the past six months to send out a mass mailing to about 360 addresses. We've got a fixed-wireless feed we use for SMTP and VPN. 512 Kbit/sec CIR, 1.5 Mbit/sec MIR. I just dumped the message body into Sendmail on our Linux Internet gateway (rather than going through our Exchange server first). All but about 15 addresses were delivered (or bounced) in under 15 minutes; the rest were in queue for later retry due to unreachable servers. That's with no special planning/configuration, and regular SMTP and VPN traffic still going. While 1000 is obviously almost three times as many recipients, I'm still surprised to hear Exchange on a full T1 would fold under the load. Are you sure of that? -- Ben ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
Re: Mass emailing?
My Exchange server has sent tens of thousands of emails o my orgnaizations members multilpe times a week for years. I've never experienced any bandwidth issues, but I have seen queuing problems (queue backups prevent newer messages to the same domains from being sent), but thats expected. On Feb 7, 2008 4:27 PM, Michael B. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Exchange can handle millions of messages per day. Easily. It might easily eat up all your bandwidth though, but you can throttle that usage to some degree. Regards, Michael B. Smith MCSE/Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com -Original Message- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:22 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Mass emailing? On Feb 7, 2008 2:49 PM, Durf [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unless you have a *very* sanitized mailing list and more than a T1 worth of bandwidth, I would expect sending out a mass mailing like that to have a good change of bringing down your Internet line and/or your SMTP virtual server, depending on your bandwidth and how 'clean' your mailing list is. I've had occasion twice over the past six months to send out a mass mailing to about 360 addresses. We've got a fixed-wireless feed we use for SMTP and VPN. 512 Kbit/sec CIR, 1.5 Mbit/sec MIR. I just dumped the message body into Sendmail on our Linux Internet gateway (rather than going through our Exchange server first). All but about 15 addresses were delivered (or bounced) in under 15 minutes; the rest were in queue for later retry due to unreachable servers. That's with no special planning/configuration, and regular SMTP and VPN traffic still going. While 1000 is obviously almost three times as many recipients, I'm still surprised to hear Exchange on a full T1 would fold under the load. Are you sure of that? -- Ben ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~ -- ME2 ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
Mass emailing?
We're a printing company and we're facing a large increase in the price of paper, which is huge compenent of our costing. Our sales department has asked me to come up with a way to send an email to about 1000 of our biggest customers, explaining the increase and the price increases that will result. The recipients are all existing customers, but I'm concerned nonetheless with running afoul of spam lists and such. Is there a commonly accepted way to do this? We're on Exchange 2007. Steve ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
Re: Mass emailing?
Yes, when the following conditions are true:(which they usually are for our average small business client who doesn't alert us first that they want to do this) * Untuned smtp server * T1 or less bandwidth * Unsanitized contact list * 1000+ contacts ...then yes, you can very easily swamp the SMTP server and the oubound bandwidth. Exchange itself is usually find for internal-internal emails, but the queues, firewall and outbound traffic are often swamped. I've seen this about five or six times in the last 5+ years; it's usually the first (and only) time a client tries to send a mass email out to their entire contact list they've painstakingly build up in an Exchange public folder (or multiple, given the limits on Exchange address lists...) -- Durf On Feb 7, 2008 4:21 PM, Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Feb 7, 2008 2:49 PM, Durf [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unless you have a *very* sanitized mailing list and more than a T1 worth of bandwidth, I would expect sending out a mass mailing like that to have a good change of bringing down your Internet line and/or your SMTP virtual server, depending on your bandwidth and how 'clean' your mailing list is. I've had occasion twice over the past six months to send out a mass mailing to about 360 addresses. We've got a fixed-wireless feed we use for SMTP and VPN. 512 Kbit/sec CIR, 1.5 Mbit/sec MIR. I just dumped the message body into Sendmail on our Linux Internet gateway (rather than going through our Exchange server first). All but about 15 addresses were delivered (or bounced) in under 15 minutes; the rest were in queue for later retry due to unreachable servers. That's with no special planning/configuration, and regular SMTP and VPN traffic still going. While 1000 is obviously almost three times as many recipients, I'm still surprised to hear Exchange on a full T1 would fold under the load. Are you sure of that? -- Ben ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~ -- -- Give a man a match, and he'll be warm for a minute. But set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life. ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
