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

The task is mostly uninteresting on a strictly technical level. You should worry about what happens when a recipient thinks that your list's content is spam and starts (a) complaining or (b) flagging the message as spam with one or more anti-spam service providers. Something like this is bound to happen with a list of the size you describe.

If you are prepared and have the time handle such cases, go for it, at least for a start. (Changing your mail server's IP address as Devin Ceartas suggests won't be of much use by the way.)

If you want to build your own thing, I have two pieces of advice:

1. Unsubscribing has to be easy, no more than one or two clicks. Using Mailman or any other mailing list manager that was intended for discussion mailing lists is asking for trouble.
2. BCCing the same message to 1500 (or 25k) recipients may take some load off your mail server, but it has one serious disadvantage: You won't be able to use VERP in order to determine if all addresses that have once been subscribed to your list are still valid. (Large mail providers tend to classify messages as spam if there are delivery attempts to many invalid addresses.)