My ESP advisor reads peoples minds ;-)<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 12:24 PM, Alex Broens <span dir="ltr"><ms-list@alexb.ch></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div><div></div><div class="h5">On 3/16/2009 4:53 PM, Dan Carl wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Paul Welsh wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Thanks for the responses, everyone.<br>
<br>
To give some background, the company I work for has about 50,000<br>
customer email addresses collected over years but not used yet. The<br>
idea is to start using them. The customers were told we'd be sending<br>
marketing material by email but it was on the basis of "we will email<br>
you unless you write to us" basis - this was part of their finance<br>
agreement with us.<br>
<br>
The Marketing dept said wanted to "clean" the list before emailing all<br>
the customers to tell them about our soon-to-be-launched new web site,<br>
hence the idea of checking the addresses.<br>
<br>
My initial response was to send the message and clean the list on the<br>
basis of the bounce backs and unsubscribe requests.<br>
<br>
I did find a few $30 type apps on the web such as email verifier here<br>
- <a href="http://www.maxprog.com" target="_blank">www.maxprog.com</a>. You can import a file of addresses and the app<br>
then does an MX lookup and then an SMTP helo, mail from and rcpt to on<br>
each address. The results can be exported to a tab delimited file.<br>
<br>
All well and good I thought, but then I saw the excludes list and<br>
noted that nearly all the popular providers like Yahoo, BTOpenWorld,<br>
AOL, etc, were excluded. It dawned on me that these providers don't<br>
do any address checking prior to accepting a message for delivery -<br>
presumably to circumvent spammers using dictionary attacks to figure<br>
out which addresses are valid.<br>
<br>
It strikes me that we need a "proper" mailing list application to<br>
process the bounce backs and unsubscribes. Any suggestions? Is<br>
unsubscribing via a web link the way to go these days?<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
I use bulkmail-perl, it's not fancy but if you don't mind working from terminal. It does the job.<br>
You can send both text and html messages with it. Then just put a link to a web page for people of unsubscribe.<br>
If you have 50,000 email list thats old. I'd be really surprised if half of them are still valid.<br>
A majority of people change their email addresses quite often for whatever reason.<br>
You may want to try sending an email out to all of them with some kind of an incentive for them to reply back.<br>
Then you'll have a "clean" list.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
<br></div></div>
and possibly be blacklisted if you hit traps - what you want to do is technically simple - but the methods and possible outcome are not trivial.<br>
<br>
Get advice from a decent ESP before you ruin your reputation.<br>
(sadly ESPs standards are falling and they're all letting their pants down for a buck)<br>
<br>
have fun.<br><font color="#888888">
<br>
Alex</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Alex Neuman van der Hans<br>Reliant Technologies<br>+507 6781-9505<br>+507 202-1525<br><a href="mailto:alex@rtpty.com">alex@rtpty.com</a><br>Skype: alexneuman<br>