I see you found your old profile Rodney, 47 posts to 1470 in a single day... Super Rodney!
We thought it may be helpful to share with you some details about our experience at InteractiveWebs.
We have been in your situation, and the reason we developed our Bulk Emailer module is to solve the exact problems you face now, but with a goal of sending 88,000 email messages and SMS messages every week from one website. The problems we faced took us over 2 years of tweaking and modifying to solve.
Some of the specific issues with bulk email from a DNN site includes.
1. Invalid data (bad email addresses)
2. Spam filters
3. Risk of being blacklisted
4. Bounce Back
5. Unsubscribe Management (important in Australia to meet legal requirements)
To solve these issues we developed a number of integrated strategies.
1. We developed our module to handle invalid email addresses that are either imported into custom lists, or manually set into the database and reside on a DNN users account. The sending of an email against an account or list with invalid email addresses will not stop sends. This was a bit issue with other bulk email applications we tested both inside and outside DNN.
2. Spam filters are dependant on several things.
Content - We found that templates are important, and our module can use html templates. But our best results are using MS word to mhtml. We found that a single page html page is really designed to be an email. Most spam servers allow this content through. Key word checking etc is always an issue. So don't push Viagra at users.
- Correct DNS and SMTP settings for your sites SMTP server. - Very important for reveres lookups, and is often over looked.
- How many email messages are sent at one time to the receiving smtp servers. - we put our system on a timer that sends 50 email messages per cycle. Slow the cycle in the scheduler settings to ensure that the messages are dripped out at a good rate.
3. This is based on a number of things. a few of the important things are.
- with AOL type services. How many people click on marking you as a spam email in a set period. - This is why a robust opt out system that knows the email address that the email was sent to is important. If someone opts out of communication with our system, it is easy and will work, even if the email address is imported into a separate send list. (there is an override option too for emergency communication)
- Slowing the cycle to mail servers like AOL is important for this too. See the above.
- Using tokens for making email messages unique in content. "Dear John" etc. We have tokens for any profile data item you create.
- Ensuring that your html template does not reference images on spam listed sites - our MHTML system makes this easy.
4. Bounce Management - because a large number of email addresses can be invalid. Bounce management can reduce the load on your SMTP server by not sending to email addresses that are known to bounce. We have this built in our latest version.
5. Unsubscribe - Mentioned above. but also important in Australia and many other countries that you meet your legal requirements. This does, and has a management system for it too.
Bulk Emailer
We are releaseing a trial version this week. Please check it out.