Pyramid and Mass mailing tool

[tonthon]

Hi,

We're looking for a good mass mailing tool ( not spam :) ) that we would
manage through a pyramid + SQLA based application.

Any thoughts on a possible solution ?

Regards,

Gaston

[Carlos Daniel Ruvalcaba Valenzuela]

You are probably better off using a service such as sendgrid,
mailchip, etc. Usually mass mailing (even if not spam) is a very good
way of having your host blacklisted pretty fast :-), also having to
setup your own mail server and all that.

If you want something simple you can try using pyramid_mailer plus any
queueing tool (like celery), I tried something similar once and works
fine (until you start getting blacklisted that is :-))

Regards,
Carlos Ruvalcaba

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[Jonathan Vanasco]

The cheapest option would be to host the images on Amazon S3 and send
the email with Amazon SES. SES charges a 10¢ CPM , and data transfer
in is free ( so you don't have to run the app on EC2 ). You do pay
bandwidth, but it's their standard 12¢/GB charge. Your effective CPM
ends up being around 13¢.

If you drop the pyramid/sqla dependency, this $59 app installs on php
+mysql and does custom campaigns -- http://sendy.co The downside is
that it's not open source and there's no api.

All that being said... if I had to do mass mailing + pyramid/sqla, i'd
probably do it like this:

- EC2 instance handles sending emails though SES + the bouncing + the
receipt tracking
- EC2 instance has an API that lets you drop a "payload" file of
addresses + content for processing , then triggers it
- EC2 instance has another API that does periodic data dumps and
polling

the reason i'd offload onto a dedicated EC2 system, is that mass
emails tend to have more annoying concurrency issues. too many people
read the damn thing at similar times, so tracking beacons can
bottleneck. dealing with all the sending / bouncing can be a strain
on your resources -- and you'll likely want to do "warmups" on your IP
in order to deal with ISPs and email companies blocking you. warmup
is when you let emails trickle out, first by the dozen , then
hundreds, then thousands -- if your IP gets flagged from suddenly
sending too many emails, it gets blacklisted.

If money isn't an object though, i'd definitely go with piping emails
to SendGrid or SailThru which both have robust APIs. SailThru is more
expensive but totally worth it. Managing your own outgoing email is a
fucking pain -- after you get all the DKIM+SPF stuff set up, you have
to start and maintain relationships with major providers like AOL,
Yahoo, MSN, etc to deal with bounce and false-postivie patterns.
That's nearly a fulltime job. I prefer letting vendors like those 2
handle it. They're both better products and better priced than
companies like ConstantContact, MailChimp, etc

sorry if i got too much into the business side - i oversaw daily and
weekly newsletters for a handful of premium publishers.

[tonthon]

Thanks for your advices, I think we will end up in letting one of the
existing specialists do the silly job for us :).

NB : the business point of view is always welcome :)

Le 28/03/2013 17:43, Jonathan Vanasco a �crit :

[Toni Mueller]

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 05:14:32PM +0100, tonthon wrote:
> We're looking for a good mass mailing tool ( not spam :) ) that we would
> manage through a pyramid + SQLA based application.

I've done an interface to Mailman for this purpose that lets the user
manipulate a subscriber list, and send a newsletter using a custom form
based solution (to prevent the user from sending crap content).

> Any thoughts on a possible solution ?

While external services certainly have their pros, I think there are
also a number of cons of not having your own service, handing out your
subscriber list etc.pp.


Kind regards,
--Toni++