Mass Mailing help

Hi,

While I do ruby script/generator Mailings mailing :

it bails out saying mailings coundn't find ' mailings' generator. I am not sure how to get this going, can someone please help?

Regards, Sandeep G

sandeep wrote:

Hi,

While I do ruby script/generator Mailings mailing :    1. It should be srcipt\generate (not generator) 2. you need to specify what to generate - model, controller, scaffold, ... the way you've written it right now asks it to generate a "Mailings" called 'mailing'

Cheers Mohit

Hi Mohit,

I use Mailer notifier for usual signup notification. But I was looking at Mass mailer where in we can send bunch of mails more than 100 at a time. ActionMailer has got few problems while we send too many mails at once.

Any help on mass mailing please?

Regards, Sandeep G

    sandeep wrote:     > Hi Mohit,     >     > Thank for the quick reply.     > generator was a typo while writing the email.     >     > I was trying to follow this: Index of /blog     > 'Mailings' i thought was in built ActiveMailer infrastructure.     > Isn't that true?     >     > Regards,     > Sandeep G     >     >     >> sandeep wrote:     >>     >>> Hi,     >>>     >>> While I do ruby script/generator Mailings mailing :     >>>     >> 1. It should be srcipt\generate (not generator)     >> 2. you need to specify what to generate - model, controller, scaffold,     >> ... the way you've written it right now asks it to generate a "Mailings"     >> called 'mailing'     >>     >> Cheers     >> Mohit     >>

    I haven't used ActionMailer yet, so I'm not sure. I searched and found     this:     http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToSendEmailsWithActionMailer     which has a slightly different set of instructions and uses a different     generator.

    Cheers     Mohit

sandeep wrote:

Hi Mohit,

I use Mailer notifier for usual signup notification. But I was looking at Mass mailer where in we can send bunch of mails more than 100 at a time. ActionMailer has got few problems while we send too many mails at once.

Any help on mass mailing please?

There are some alternatives: Send your mail with ActionMailer from a Backgroundrb process. I've had mixed experiences with this approach mostly relating to Backgroundrb processes disappearing and deployment hassles (Backgroundrb needs to be started before Mongrel/FastCGI).

Another alternative that I haven't tried is ar_mailer[1] which is a way to store email in the database for later processing by a seperate script.

Finally you can roll your own code for sending and running it from script/runner with a cron-job.

[1]: http://seattlerb.rubyforge.org/ar_mailer/

Just my .02$

Whatever your project, I feel that a web server, or script that runs on a web server should ever be sending email to end users. Better tools exist for this purpose. Tools that are designed to handle millions of messages without issues.

Sounds like you are trying to send a whole mess of email, in that case, I would recommend getting a mail server setup to handle the volume of mail you might be requiring.

And whatever you are doing, don't fucking SPAM. Nothing will degrade your project more then UCE. Trust me, been there, closed that business. :slight_smile:

~k

Kurth Bemis wrote:

Just my .02$

Whatever your project, I feel that a web server, or script that runs on a web server should ever be sending email to end users. Better tools exist for this purpose. Tools that are designed to handle millions of messages without issues.

Could you elaborate on what kind of tools this might be? I often need to send out newsletters to 1000's of users with customized content for each single user. So far I've been generating these mails with ActionMailer and using a Ruby script for queueing them on the mailserver on the local machine. Are there better ways of doing this?

have a look at http://www.phplist.com/

Hi Kurth, Jacob, Thomas

Thanks for the advice! If we use Phplist then, we also need to run php on our hosting server?

How do we prevent a mail being identified as spam? Identical looking mails being sent out in huge numbers, will get caught as spam i thought. Can we avoid being identified spam?

Regards, Sandeep G

Mass mailing consists of sending numerous duplicate mails to the same email address. These types of mail bombs are simple to design but their extreme simplicity means they can be easily detected by spam filters. Email-bombing using mass mailing is also commonly performed as a DDoS attack by employing the use of "zombie" botnets; hierarchical networks of computers compromised by malware and under the attacker's control. Similar to their use in spamming, the attacker instructs the botnet to send out millions or even billions of e-mails, but unlike normal botnet spamming, the e-mails are all addressed to only one or a few addresses the attacker wishes to flood. This form of email bombing is similar in purpose to other DDoS flooding attacks.