Bulk Emailer

Introduction

Charities, churches and clubs need to broadcast email notices to all their members. Typical tools for doing this are hard to use. They are designed primarily for spammers rather than for those with a legitimate need to send bulk emails. Email programs like Eudora are not designed to work with large mailing lists. It is tedious breaking the lists up into bite size pieces for them. In contrast, the CMP bulk emailer was primarily designed to be easy to use.

How It Works

To send a bulk email, compose your email exactly as you would send it to an individual. It can be formatted or not. It can have colours and fonts It must have a subject. It can have embedded pictures. It can be plain, or styled (with HTML) or both. It can have attachments. Use whatever tool you are familiar with to create the email, Eudora, Outlook. Pegasus, Pine, Polarbar etc,

Create a list of email addresses and names you want this mail sent to. You might use a simple Abundance database to do this, or you might create it with a word processor. The list is technically called a CSV Comma Separated Value list. Entries look like this

john@mindprod.com is the email address.
John is the name that will appear on the TO:
John Green is the person's full name. This is useful if you get a reject to figure out which person it was.
0010 is the optional account number if you have a database with account numbers. It too is useful it tracking rejects.

You then attach the list to your email. Then you send the message to an email account reserved for accepting bulk email to be relayed, e.g. bulk@mydomain.com. In theory, you could send it to yourself, but having special reserved account for bulk emails is simpler.

Then you fire up the bulk email processor by clicking STARTBULK. You can leave it up to process as many different bulk email masters as you want. It does not matter which you do first, STARTBULK or send email masters. When you are done, you can shut it down by clicking STOPBULK. Each email will appear to have been individually sent from whomever originated the bulk email. Every one will be identical. Nobody will see any other names on the CC:

You will get an email back from the bulk emailer about rejects. Make sure you research them and fix the database. You may also get a few individually bounced emails back later. They too need to be researched and corrected.

If you are nervous, you can do a test run first, that sends only a copy back to you, by putting don't send as the subject.

Use With Eudora

To use with the Eudora email program, compose the bulk email as if you were going to send it to an individual recipient. You can use any of the fancy formatting features such as colour, bold, type sizes, and italic. Address it to the special bulk account, e.g. bulk@myisp.com. Right click Attach file and specify the name of the file listing the email addresses of the recipients, usually produced by an abundance program, e.g. C:\CIV\LIVE\EMAILS.TXT. Then type click the STARTBULK icon. After all the emails have been sent, click the STOPBULK icon.

Recovering

If for any reason your computer or the program should crash during a bulk mail run, you will have to type CLEARBULK to reset it. To be very safe, you might want to manually read the mail you sent to the bulk email account, to clear the queue of work, figure out just what was sent, and then resend what was not. Without that step, it should recover fine, with some possibility of sending some messages twice.

Configuring

When you order the program, I burn into it various facts about you, such as the names of the email accounts you want to authorise to use your bulk mailer, and the names your email servers. When the program arrives, it is 100% ready to go. There is nothing for you to configure. I will work with you until you are successful.

I will guide you to tell me such things as:

The email account, login and password you want to use for relaying bulk mail.
The list of people who are authorised to use the program.
The name of your mailserver.
The IP of your DNS server (discovered by sending the output of IPCONFIG)

The program is written in Java, so part of the installation process requires installing the Java runtime, which can then be used for any Java programs. There is no extra cost for this, just extra steps in the installation process.

Prerequisites

You need two standard POP3 email accounts one for creating the emails e.g. myChurch@somedomain.com and being the official sender of the mails, and the other used for relaying the emails, e.g. bulk@somedomain.com. Often these come bundled free with your internet access. Webmail accounts will not work, such as yahoo.com or hotmail.com. You can often borrow email acccouts from someone who has extras they are not using. In a pinch you should be able to rent the pair of them for under $10.00 USD a month from almost any ISP (Internet Service Provider) on the planet. I would recommend renting the locally for better phone support and for getting help from friends aleady familiar with their peculiarities.

You also need a decent email program for creating the emails. I suggest Eudora. It lets you create many special effects including adding pictures, coloured text, varying fonts and sizes of text. You can download a free copy from eudora.com. If you are already using Outlook you could continue to use that, though I would strongly recommend against it since it is so prone to spreading viruses and worms.

If you are unfamiliar with computers, it will be much easier on you if you find someone locally, not necessarily a computer expert, who has set up email accounts and email software before. Once you have the two email accounts set up and working with Eudora, it is relatively easy to get the Bulk Emailer working after that.

You need a Pentium class machine or better, capable of running Java. I would recommend having 256 megabytes or more of RAM. You are not limited to running on Windows 98/NT/2000/XP machines, though it will be simpler if you are. The bulk emailer will run on anything that supports Java and JavaMail. You can get a jump start on checking out the suitability of your machine by installing java and seeing if you can run the Biorhythms Applet.

Friendly Email Hosting

If you send out thousands of emails, your ISP might start complaining. He may impose a quota. One way around this is to do the mailing in batches. Let us say you were signed up with shaw.ca who puts a limit of 1000 outgoing emails per day on all business accounts. Let's say you had under 300 emails going out as part of your normal traffic. That leaves you 700 to use for bulk emails. You split your mailing into batches of 700. It might take you several days to get your bulk mailing out that way. If you prepare you mail list with an Abundance program, you would use the pages feature to select the correct batch.

If anyone complains about your emails as spam, even if they deliberately asked for them, your ISP may shut you down. So you want to check with your ISP first that they won't mind what you plan to do, and they won't block you.

What are you options if your ordinary email provider is not suitable? You can search with google for bulk email hosting for ISPs happy to take your bulk email business.

If you are more adventurous, you can set up you own email server, in effect, become a miniature ISP, and handle your own mail sending. You would need to run the email server software all the time so that it could both resend failed emails, and accept rejects. This is considerably more of a technical challenge that running the bulk emailer.

The advantage of the mailerver approach is it runs faster, since ordinary ISPs put a choke on the mail to keep the flow to a dull roar. The bottleneck in using the bulk emailer is the speed at which the mail server accepts mail to send. The disadvantage is the mail server approach is more complicated since you have to buy, install, configure and maintain an email server. Even with your own server, your ISP connection provider might field complaints about your emails and shut you down. When you use a hosting service who is bulk email-friendly that is not a problem. Complaints usually go to the mail provider, not your connection provider.

Costs

The bulk emailer is for sale only for legitimate purposes to charities, churches and clubs. It not for general spamming use.

All prices are in $0.00 USD , but of course you can change that.

$50.00 USD for the bulk Emailer and coaching you through installation and your first few emails.

If you want a minimal Abundance database that just tracks your members and their email addresses and nothing else, that would cost about $50.00 CAD It would let you maintain a list of all your members and select out groups of them based on targets, e.g. for a church you might have a target for choir members, another for board members, another for large contributors, another for people who volunteer for bingo night, etc. You specify which targets you want to include in any given mailing. Some active members many on be ten different targets, but they will still get the mailing only once.

If you want a custom-written Abundance database to track your members and various facts about them, and print reports, mail labels etc, that would cost about $250.00 CAD ($250.00 USD) if you want a custom-written Abundance database to track your members and money, issuing tax receipts etc. that would cost $500.00 CAD ($500.00 USD) to $1000.00 CAD ($1000.00 USD). We would have a discussion about your needs and I could give you a firm price quotation.

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