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Ask HN: Best way to send out large-scale emailers?

1 points by vette982 ↗ HN
A friend of mine has been running a fairly successful e-commerce operation for the last 3 years, and he's been having trouble with sending emails to a mailing list of between 700 and 800k email addresses. Basically, the volume of emails is starting to bog down his servers and T1 lines. Does anyone have suggestions for 1) balancing he load when sending the emailers out to minimize the impedance of email campaigns on the servers and connection or 2) a cost-effective alternative to which the email campaigns can be outsourced.

Thanks!

4 comments

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FiReaNG3L
Dada mail lets you specify a max per hour for batch sends. Never tried it with huge mailing lists however!
makecheck
It seems like Unix tools could be used to chop this up fairly effectively. For example, if you had a single text file with all target addresses in it, one per line...

- "split" could be used to cut the list into chunks (separate files)

- delays could be set up in tools such as "at" or "crontab", so that E-mails of each sub-file are attempted at entirely different times (e.g. an hour apart)

- a script written in shell or almost anything else could iterate over a given file's addresses and send messages

RiderOfGiraffes
Er, there are 86400 seconds in a day (not considering leap seconds, etc) so just sending 10 per second should get them all out in a day. That doesn't sound too many, or too much.

Where is the bottleneck? Has he profiled the process?

vette982
I think a big factor that's hurting the process is the emails that bounce or must wait to be received by the server on the receiving end. The server keeps retrying sending emails to those addresses, and eventually it just accumulates.