Bulk Emailer
by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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Introduction
Charities, churches and clubs need to broadcast email notices to all their
members. Typical tools for doing this are hard to use. They are designed
primarily for spammers rather than for those with a legitimate need to send bulk
emails. Email programs like Eudora are not designed to work with large mailing
lists. It is tedious breaking the lists up into bite size pieces for them. In
contrast, the CMP bulk emailer was primarily designed to be easy to use.
How It Looks to the Subscribers
The emails that arrive to your subscribers looking as if they had been
individually addressed in the TO: field. They may be formatted (HTML) or plain.
They might contain embedded images. They might include attachments. However, the
emails are not customised in any way. Everyone gets exactly the same
message. There is no customising the message for each recipient, other than the
TO: field. Subscribers cannot see the names of any other subscribers. Unlike a
BCC:, they see themselves as the primary recipient of the message.
Benefits
Here are some reasons to use the CMP Bulk Emailer rather than the competition:
- You can use any email program you are familiar with to the prepare the bulk
email. You don’t have to learn a new tool.
- You can use any of the fancy features of your mail program including fonts,
colours, sizes, pictures, and enclosures.
- It can fairly easily integrate into your existing database. It does not insist
you learn a new program to track your clients.
- Every email looks to the end user as if you had individually sent it only to
them.
- You don’t have to set up, configure and manage a complicated local mail
server, though you can if you want super speed.
- You don’t have to configure anything. CMP does that for you and will talk
you through the setup. You don’t need to be a computer whiz to use the
program.
- The program does an exhaustive series of checks on email addresses before
actually sending the emails. This means you get fewer bounced emails.
- You don’t need to rent space on a web server. The bulk emailer is
connected to the Internet only when it is sending emails.
- It costs only
.
Disadvantages
- The CMP Bulk Emailer is not a ListServ. Subscribers
cannot add or remove themselves from the list. If you need that ability, see the ListServ
Software Vendors.
- With the CMP Bulk Emailer there is no way to customise each email to the
recipient, e.g. inserting their subscription expiry date.
- The CMP Bulk Emailer is not suitable for lists of hundreds of thousands of
people. It is designed for small lists, e.g. club memberships or lists of
newspapers or lists of politicians not spamming. Because it normally uses a
remote mailserver, it is not particularly fast.
- The CMP Bulk Emailer does not come with a database. You either have to get me to
write you one or you have to use one you get elsewhere, or you have to do
something Mickey Mouse with a word processor or spread sheet.
- The CMP Bulk Emailer costs
. Some ListServ software is free, though you require a costly webserver to run
it on. Most costs over
and is considerably more complex to manage.
How It Works
To send a bulk email, compose your email exactly as you would send it to an
individual. It can be formatted or not. It can have colours
and fonts It must have a subject. It can have embedded
pictures. It can be plain, or styled (with HTML) or both. It can have
attachments. Use whatever tool you are familiar with to create the email, e.g.
Eudora, Opera, Outlook, Pegasus, Pine, Polarbar, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, etc.
You can even use a WebMail program such as HotMail. Use any of the fancy
features you please.
Create a list of email addresses and names you want this mail sent to. You might
use a simple Abundance database to do this, or you might create it with a word
processor, or you might export it from your client database. [Abundance is just
a computer language for writing database applications with extensive validation
of data. It is relevant only if you don’t already have a database.] You
database should give you the ability to select the people by various criteria to
spin off to send a letter to.
The list is technically called a CSV Comma Separated Value list. Entries look
like this:
mayor@city.victoria.bc.ca is the email address.
Mayor Lowe is the name that will appear on the TO:
Mayor Allan Lowe is the person’s full name. This
is useful if you get a reject to figure out which person it was.
0001 is the optional account number if you have a
database with account numbers. It too is useful it tracking rejects.
You then attach the list to your email. Then you send
the message to an email account reserved for accepting bulk email to be relayed,
e.g. bulk@mydomain.com. In theory, you could send it
to yourself, but having special reserved account for bulk emails is simpler.
Then you fire up the bulk email processor by clicking STARTBULK.
You can leave it up to process as many different bulk email masters as you want.
It does not matter which you do first, STARTBULK or
send email masters. When you are done, you can shut it down by clicking STOPBULK.
Each email will appear to have been individually sent from whomever originated
the bulk email. Every one will be identical. Nobody will see any other names on
the CC:
You will get an email back from the bulk emailer about rejects. Make sure you
research them and fix the database. You may also get a few individually bounced
emails back later. They too need to be researched and corrected.
If you are nervous, you can do a test run first, that sends only a copy back to
you, by putting don’t send as the subject.
Use With Eudora
To use with the Eudora email program, compose the bulk email as if you were
going to send it to an individual recipient. You can use any of the fancy
formatting features such as colour, bold, type sizes, and italic. Address it to
the special bulk account, e.g. bulk@myisp.com. Right
click Attach file and specify the name of the file listing the email
addresses of the recipients, usually produced by an abundance program, e.g. C:\CIV\LIVE\EMAILS.TXT.
Then type click the STARTBULK icon. After all the
emails have been sent, click the STOPBULK icon.
Recovering
If for any reason your computer or the program should crash during a bulk mail
run, you will have to type CLEARBULK to reset it. To be
very safe, you might want to manually read the mail you sent to the bulk email
account, to clear the queue of work, figure out just what was sent, and then
resend what was not. Without that step, it should recover fine, with some
possibility of sending some messages twice.
Prerequisites
- You need two standard SMTP/POP3 email accounts
one for creating the emails e.g. myChurch@somedomain.com
and being the official sender of the mails, and the other used for relaying the
emails, e.g. bulk@somedomain.com. Often these come
bundled free with your Internet access. WebMail accounts will not work, such as yahoo.com
or hotmail.com. You can often borrow email accounts
from someone who has extras they are not using. I repeat these are two perfectly
ordinary email accounts, nothing special about them at all. In a pinch you
should be able to rent the pair of them for under
a month from almost any ISP
(Internet Service Provider) on the planet. I would recommend renting the locally
for better phone support and for getting help from friends already familiar with
their peculiarities.
- You also need a decent email program for creating the
emails. I suggest Eudora. It lets you create many special effects including
adding pictures, coloured text, varying fonts and sizes of text. You can
download a free copy from Eudora.com.
If you are already using Outlook you could continue to use that, though I would
strongly recommend against it since it is so prone to spreading viruses and
worms.
If you are unfamiliar with computers, it will be much easier on you if you find
someone locally, not necessarily a computer expert, who has set up email
accounts and email software before. Once you have the two email accounts set up
and working with Eudora, it is relatively easy to get the Bulk Emailer working
after that.
- You need a Pentium/AMD class PC or better, capable of running Java. I would
recommend having 1 GB or more of RAM. You are not limited to running on
W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista
machines, though it will be simpler if you are. The bulk emailer will run on
anything that supports Java 1.5+ and JavaMail, e.g. Linux. You can get a jump
start on checking out the suitability of your machine by installing
java and seeing if you can run the Biorhythms
Applet.
If, bulk, the above Bulk Emailer Java application does not work…
- This Java application needs Java 1.5 or later, version 1.5.0_16 or later recommended, ideally 1.6.0_07.
- If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer, try another browser. Seriously. Microsoft has taken great pains, over and over, to screw up Java and every other multi-platform standardisation.
- To ensure your Java is up to date, check with Wassup. First, download it and run it as an application independent of your browser, then run it online as an Applet to add the complication of your browser.
- If the above application does not work, check the Java console for error messages.
- If the above application does not work, you might have better luck with the downloadable version.
- If you still can’t get the program working click HELP for more detail.
- If you can’t get the above application working after trying the advice above and from the HELP button below, have bugs to report or ideas to improve the program or its documentation, please send me an email at
.
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Help
Friendly Email Hosting
If you send out thousands of emails, your ISP might start complaining. He may
impose a quota. One way around this is to do the mailing in batches. Let us say
you were signed up with shaw.ca who puts a limit of
1000 outgoing emails per day on all business accounts. Let’s say you had
under 300 emails going out as part of your normal traffic. That leaves you 700
to use for bulk emails. You split your mailing into batches of 700. It might
take you several days to get your bulk mailing out that way. If you prepare you
mail list with an Abundance program, you would use the pages
feature to select the correct batch.
If anyone complains about your emails as spam, even if they deliberately
asked for them, your ISP may shut you down. So you want to check with your ISP
first that they won’t mind what you plan to do, and they won’t block
you.
What are you options if your ordinary email provider is not suitable? You can
search with google for bulk
email hosting for ISPs happy to take your bulk email business.
If you are more adventurous, you can set up you own email
server, in effect, become a miniature ISP, and handle your own mail sending.
You would need to run the email server software all the time so that it could
both resend failed emails, and accept rejects. This is considerably more of a
technical challenge that running the bulk emailer.
The advantage of the mailserver
approach is it runs faster, since ordinary ISPs put a choke on the mail to keep
the flow to a dull roar. The bottleneck in using the bulk emailer is the speed
at which the mail server accepts mail to send. The disadvantage is the mail
server approach is more complicated since you have to buy, install, configure
and maintain an email server. Even with your own server, your ISP connection
provider might field complaints about your emails and shut you down. When you
use a hosting service who is bulk email-friendly that is not a problem.
Complaints usually go to the mail provider, not your connection provider.
Telus blocks outgoing SMTP port 25 traffic. This discourages Telus customers
from having email accounts on other servers. This would be a problem if the
Telus email account itself had too onerous a quota. Bulk itself does not
absolutely require SMTP 25 access to other than one email account, though it
does need it for the optional mailserver validation. Further though a private
mail server used to greatly speed mailing up, would require SMTP 25 access to
outside servers.
The key is to be upfront with your ISP and your email provider about what you
plan do, telling them just how many bulk emails you plan to send each day to
make sure they have no objections. Otherwise they will interfere and block you
in many ways defeating the purpose of the program. They are often concerned that
you might up to some sort of spamming.
Configuring
When you order the program, I burn into it various facts about you, such as the
names of the email accounts you want to authorise to use your bulk mailer, and
the names your email servers. When the program arrives, it is 100% ready to go.
There is nothing for you to configure. I will work with you until you are
successful.
I will guide you to tell me such things as:
- The email account, login and password you want to use for relaying bulk mail.
- The list of people who are authorised to use the program.
- The name of your mailserver.
This information all goes in a Java class called CustConfig.java.
The program is written in Java, so part of the installation process requires
installing the Java runtime, which can then be used for any Java programs. There
is no extra cost for this, just extra steps in the installation process.
Configuring Details
To make the program work, normally you would hire me to together custom
configure a piece of of the program that looks something like this:
I will guide you to prod your mail provider to give us the information we need
to set this up. If you have some experience with email setup and Java
programming, you can configure and recompile yourself.
You must reconfigure, rebuild ( ecomplile the Java source and recreate the jar).
Just configuring the CustConfig.java file is not
sufficient.
Costs
The bulk emailer itself free.
I thought you would like to see the prices on this webpage in ,
but you can change that instantly,
thanks to the Canadian Mind Products CurrCon
Applet that you too could use on your
own website to display prices in any world currency using today’s exchange
rates.
- The bulk emailer itself is free. If you are a programmer or have a friend who is,
you can probably set it up yourself without my help.
-
for coaching you through installation and your first few emails.
- If you want a minimal Abundance database that just tracks your members and their
email addresses and nothing else, that would cost about
It would let you maintain a list of all your members and select out groups of
them based on targets, e.g. for a church you might
have a target for choir members, another for board members, another for large
contributors, another for people who volunteer for bingo night, etc. You specify
which targets you want to include in any given mailing. Some active members many
on be ten different targets, but they will still get the mailing only once.
- If you want a custom-written Abundance database to track your members and
various facts about them, and print reports, mail labels etc, that would cost
about
- If you want a custom-written Abundance database to track your members and money,
issuing tax receipts etc. that would cost
to
.
We would have a discussion about your needs and I could give you a firm price
quotation for any custom work. Send an email to.
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