Sending Email Broadcasts

Question

I\'m working on an application that will allow management to send registered users (opt-in) broadcast emails at regular intervals, or based on various other criteria. In any ca

Answer 1

Don't try to implement the actual email sending yourself. That's a huge waste of time. Either outsource the entire process to one of the many reputable vendors out there (Many organizations I deal with use Constant Contact, and it works well), or run a garden-variety mailing list server (e.g. Mailman) in-house.

Either way, take efforts to make it very easy to unsubscribe (good vendors have that covered), to authenticate that messages are from your company, and to show that your company is not spamming. Real mailing list server software supports all of these goals, by adding proper headers that identify the source very clearly and making unsubscription easy. For instance, Gmail will now offer to send unsubscribe requests in response to mailing list messages marked as 'spam', as has AOL for a long time.

Definitely set up SPF and DKIM if you can manage it.

Finally, whatever you do, make sure you keep logs of your subscriptions, so that if someone does accuse you of spamming, you can defend yourself.