Sending out emails from the Mailing List plug-in

[Robert Impey]

I've just been going through the admin section of the mailing-list
plug-in. I've submitted a whole bunch of issues to do with usability
there.

http://code.google.com/p/haddock-cms/issues/list?q=mailing+list

One point that I think should be discussed before I submit it as a bug
is to do with sending out emails from the server.

In the past, we've decided that sending out the emails from a server
could be risky, in case your server gets flagged as a spam server.
Also, users are accustomed to sending out emails with their own
applications (e.g. they know how to format an email using Outlook).

Users should continue to be able to send out emails like that (the CSV
list should remain).

However, it might be nice to be able to send out an email using the
server. For a start, if allows the mailing list to grow to huge
numbers of subscribers. A really big list might have a CSV list that
is too long to be cut and pasted easily.

Also, if the program sends out the email, each email could be address
to the named recipient.

Finally, a link to the page for unsubscribing your email from the list
could be included at the bottom of each email.

[Saul Howard]

I agree with all of the issues. Concerning this one:

"Afeter navigating away from the people list, you should be returned
to the same selection of people."

Is this something that could be added to all of the CRUD admin pages?
I find this problem a lot when using the haddock admin pages to
administer large data sets.

I recently used the Mailing List plugin to send a mail shot out to
about 850 people. I used the csv to do this. I would have preferred to
do it from within haddock. However, it was an HTML email, so I had to
create it in Outlook anyway. One problem with sending them through my
GMail account was the 500 emails-at-one-time limit.

So, are you saying it would be alright to send ~1000 emails at a time
from the server? Wouldn't this lead to blacklisting?

Of the emails I did send, any that went to Hotmail addresses went
straight to Spam. I thought this might be because of the BCC field (if
Hotmail is aware of that), or perhaps because I didn't know the
person's name. I don't know if this happened with other email services.

[Robert Impey]

On Jul 16, 11:01 pm, Saul Howard <saulhow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree with all of the issues. Concerning this one:
>
> "Afeter navigating away from the people list, you should be returned
> to the same selection of people."
>
> Is this something that could be added to all of the CRUD admin pages?
> I find this problem a lot when using the haddock admin pages to
> administer large data sets.
>

The latest CRUD admin pages do have this behaviour built in. However,
the admin pages for the mailing list are pretty ancient. I'm going to
rewrite them.

If you see any other pages in the admin section that don't save the
selection criteria, please raise an issue.

> I recently used the Mailing List plugin to send a mail shot out to
> about 850 people. I used the csv to do this. I would have preferred to
> do it from within haddock. However, it was an HTML email, so I had to
> create it in Outlook anyway. One problem with sending them through my
> GMail account was the 500 emails-at-one-time limit.

An option to split the CSV into lists of a set size might be helpful.

>
> So, are you saying it would be alright to send ~1000 emails at a time
> from the server? Wouldn't this lead to blacklisting?

Hard to know. I'm not sure that it's more suspicious than sending out
a load of emails from Outlook or a webmail account. If the emails were
sent out one at a time, it might be less risky. Or it might look like
you're trying to hide something.

I think that if you send out a load of emails and the emails contain
links to an unsubscribe page and that page is on the same IP as the
server that sent out the email, it looks less suspicious.

Predicting how spam filters are going to behave is pretty inexact. Can
anyone point us to a description of Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail's spam
policy?

>
> Of the emails I did send, any that went to Hotmail addresses went
> straight to Spam. I thought this might be because of the BCC field (if
> Hotmail is aware of that), or perhaps because I didn't know the
> person's name. I don't know if this happened with other email services.

If you sent the emails out through gmail, I'm not sure how the email
was processed. I think that the way that BCC fields are supposed to
work is that the first mail transport that gets your email (e.g. the
SMTP server) is supposed to copy the email and send it individually to
each address. I'm not certain that the server won't (or mustn't) send
on copy to all the addresses at one domain and then rely of the
delivery server at the domain to copy the email to each address
individually. If the latter is the case, then hotmail would be able to
see that the email was being sent to a lot of people.

The only solution is to experiment responsibly and report any findings
publicly.