Using php mail for a large newsletter

I am looking to email out a large newsletter from a website that is on a shared host. There will be close to 1000 recipients. Every newsletter will be exactly the same. I have two major concerns:

1) how can I get past as many junk mail filters as possible (the users would have left a send me your newsletter box ticked so they want the newsletter)?

2) if I send the mail to my own account and bcc in all the recipients, how many recipients per email should I limit it to?

This will be the first time I've attempted a newsletter on this scale and I want to make sure that as many people as possible receive it.

Thanks!

 

Hey Sharpweb,

You should have a look at phpLIST from Tincan (http://tincan.co.uk/phplist).

I found it took a bit of configuration and a little more trial and error, but once working, it delivers beautifully. It's quick and has some really great features....

Cheers

 

Thanks. That software looks good, problem is that we already have our mailing list ready. More will be added in the future, as they signup. I've also created the newsletter and all that with php all I need to do now is send it.

I just want to make sure it gets to as many users as possible and doesn't get snagged by junkmail filters or I don't send it to too many at a time and some get lost.

Any ideas?

 

What I do is that I have the recipients email and name in a database, so I fetch it from there, then for every email address I run a mail() function to send it out, so everyone will get a personalised email with their own name and To: address and it won't look so much like a bulk mailing.

Then before I send the mail, I test it with my own email account which is on a server with spamassassin and amavisd - I'll then check if those two complains about the mail and see what anti-spam rules it might trigger and adjust the email accordingly.

 

For 1000 people you are best using Outlook and just adding all the recipients as a bcc, I do this and it works fine.

 

Well I do it my way for around 30.000 subscriptions (via. a dedicated postfix smtpd server) - that works fine too

 

won't the junkmail filters block you if you do this?

 

I don't have access to change the script timeout on my server so I may run into problems

I like that idea.

 

If you don't have something like that readily availible yourself, feel free to try and send your newsletter to me and I'll check what my server says.

Email is in profile.

 

I have used it to send 1000 with no problems......it is not possible for any of the recipients to know how many other recipients there are so the spam filters won't have a problem with it.

 

Whether or not yo choose the excellent PHPList (I use it too) do read this thread in their forum to avoid not getting through to hotmail, aol, gmail and all other biggies: http://www.phplist.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3328

 

Thanks...I might just do that

 

Turns out I can turn on Spam Assassin on one of my mail servers. Here are the results:

My conclusion is that The HTML is the main problem and maybe I should have a simple text message with a link to a webpage....does that sound like a good idea???

 

most isps run 4-5 for spam detection. Also 50-60% html is pretty high...

 

This is the results I got:

X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=5.9 tagged_above=-999.0 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_99, DNS_FROM_RFC_WHOIS, EXCUSE_3, EXCUSE_7, HTML_50_60, HTML_MESSAGE, MIME_HTML_MOSTLY, MPART_ALT_DIFF

What is says is:

BAYES_99: Bayesian analysis against previous spam that I have recieved is a pretty good match, you can't really do that much about this one.

DNS_FROM_RFC_WHOIS: Your sending domain is listed in rfc-ignorant.org for a non working abuse account, this should be fixed. You can go to rfc-ignorant.org and search for the domain (opentransfers.com) to see proof of why it was listed.

EXCUSE_3: The rule for this is: /to (?:be removed|be deleted|no longer receive th(?:is|ese) messages?) (?:from|send|reply|[e-]*mail)/i - it is this line that triggers it: "If you wish to be removed from this mailing list"

MPART_ALT_DIFF: The text and html versions of your email are different.

EXCUSE_7: The rule for this is: /you (?:wish|want|would like|desire) to be removed/i - it is the same line as EXCUSE_3 that triggers that one too.

 

ya i put on the ultra high settings...pretty drunk now will lokk in morn

really appreciate all the replys

 

drunk ?? hehe

I've heard that you can import your existing lists into PHPList and handles then you just use PHPList for the unsubscibe function.

I like the feature where you can tell it to fetch a website page for a newsletter, and it does the rest.

Another cool feature I saw on their feature list is domain throttling and you can set how many emails you wanna send per hour.

This is really amazing products if you ask me and open source too(GPL)

 

Ended up with a mean hang over!

Does 50-60% html mean that much of the email was html code?

And in the errors my version of spam assassin gave me how do I fix this " 0.4 MPART_ALT_DIFF BODY: HTML and text parts are different" ... the html is bound to be different from the text!!!

 

means 50-60% was encapsulated in html not necessarily mark up language

 

just thought I'd post some useful links I found while looking into this:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/AvoidingFpsForSenders