Mass Mailing Software

Topic

New Reply

I am in a homeowners group that needs to be able to send a newsletter and occasional announcements to 200-300 email addresses in our neighborhood. I’m wondering what kinds of software might be available to do that mailing. Ideally, I would like to do the sending from my home PC (Vista Home Premium) and maintain the email addresses on my PC. In some cases, the occasional mailings are requests for information from the homeowners and it would be ideal if the return address in those emails could be the address of the person who has initiated the request, not my address.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Bill

Reply | Quote

Replies

You could use the Groups option in Outlook Express as show here.

Or you might want to look at Fairlogic WorldCast. I have no personal experience with this software, but it appears to do what you are wanting to do.

Reply | Quote

The problem with using an Outlook Express group is the number of recipients. I have been using that feature for my current smaller email list but the new list will contain too many addresses, I believe. I’m hoping to be able to do the sending without splitting them up into several groups.

I did notice the Fairlogic products when I did a search but I’m hoping I can hear from someone who has some actual experience using it or a similar mailer.

Thanks,
Bill

Reply | Quote

Edited by Diegol to provide the link for the English Wikipedia entry on IIS

Hope I’m not too late.

Yes, I’ve stumbled on that difficulty many times. It’s likely that your ISP is placing a limit on the number of recipients per e-mail when you use their SMTP service. After getting the “bounce” message you have the sensation of having committed felony when you actually were up to no big deal (inviting a bunch of people to my birthday was my case), but it seems reasonable that they control outgoing traffic some way.

I tried some mass/bulk mailers in the past, but they were kind of problematic. I also tried Windows’ Internet Information Services, which lets you set up your own SMTP server. However, some sent e-mails never made it to their destination and I didn’t get any notice. At some point I got tired of this too (much too troublesome to send ONE or TWO mails a year). I recall there being a security issue with leaving the IIS service up and running all time, so I had to turn the service on and then off each time.

My last approach was to use the web interface of my Gmail account. It’s not all that comfortable to pick Outlook contacts one by one, copy their e-mail addresses and paste them into Gmail’s “CCO” field, but not such a chore if you don’t do this routinely. I’m certain there must be a way to handle Gmail contacts in a convenient way. Up to you to investigate!

Reply | Quote

Thanks for your comments. I noticed a utility that Mark Liquorman has on his web site that was a demo for MS Access code that was supposed to do mailings so I downloaded it and found that I could get very far with it so I asked Mark about the problems and he said it was very old and he should have removed it but he could give me some newer sample Access code, which uses the CDO library, that is supposed to be able to send messages. I’ve fixed up that sample code into a routine that is successfully sending test messages for me. So, I’m concentrating on building up an Access database that will store all the address lists and send messages to selected subsets as needed. It looks like it should work out fine.

Thanks,
Bill

Reply | Quote

You might contact your ISP to ask about their policies regarding e-mail. Sending hundreds of e-mails within a short period of time could raise the suspicion that your PC has been infected by a spam robot, and cause your outgoing e-mail to be blocked.

Reply | Quote

I agree with Hans!

If we were to send our outgoing email from work via a POP3 account rather than our usual Exchange account, we would be limited by our ISP to a maximum of 50 email addresses per outgoing email, for “spam prevention purposes”…

And “No, we can’t change this limit. For anybody!”…

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

Reply | Quote

BATcher,

Yes I understand that limit on the number of addresses in group emails. I don’t know how high it is for the SMTP server (FastMail.fm) that I normally use to send and receive emails, including sending to groups, but I send to a group of about 75 addresses every month or so and that hasn’t been any problem. However, my list of addresses is going to go up to 150-200 and may grow quite a bit after that so what I’m working on now is a mailer that will send them one at a time, in quick succession. I don’t know if those will be counted and limited or not.

Bill

Reply | Quote

Hans,

I hadn’t thought of that! I’ll have to check and see what I can learn.

Thanks,
Bill

Reply | Quote

Do a Google search on “Email manager”, with the quotes and you will find many souces of handling your bulk email.
There are even some free ones.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

Reply | Quote

Yes, I’ve looked at some of those but I haven’t researched it thoroughly. I’m a retired Access programmer and have a mailer working so I’m going to go ahead and finish the database that will hold all the addresses and do the mailing. If the actual mailing of a quantity of messages in a short time gets stopped by the ISP I’ll have to go back and do that search and see what is available.

Thanks,
Bill

Reply | Quote