Bulk Emailer

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©1996-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products

Introduction

How It Looks to the Subscribers

Benefits

• You can use any email program you are familiar with to the prepare the bulk email. You don’t have to learn a new tool.
• You can use any of the fancy features of your mail program including fonts, colours, sizes, pictures, and enclosures.
• It can fairly easily integrate into your existing database. It does not insist you learn a new program to track your clients.
• Every email looks to the end user as if you had individually sent it only to them.
• You don’t have to set up, configure and manage a complicated local mail server, though you can if you want super speed.
• You don’t have to configure anything. CMP does that for you and will talk you through the setup. You don’t need to be a computer whiz to use the program.
• The program does an exhaustive series of checks on email addresses before actually sending the emails. This means you get fewer bounced emails.
• You don’t need to rent space on a web server. The bulk emailer is connected to the Internet only when it is sending emails.
• It costs only  $40.00 USD .

Disadvantages

• The CMP Bulk Emailer is not a ListServ. Subscribers cannot add or remove themselves from the list. If you need that ability, see the ListServ Software Vendors.
• With the CMP Bulk Emailer there is no way to customise each email to the recipient, e.g. inserting their subscription expiry date.
• The CMP Bulk Emailer is not suitable for lists of hundreds of thousands of people. It is designed for small lists, e.g. club memberships or lists of newspapers or lists of politicians not spamming. Because it normally uses a remote mailserver, it is not particularly fast.
• The CMP Bulk Emailer does not come with a database. You either have to get me to write you one or you have to use one you get elsewhere, or you have to do something Mickey Mouse with a word processor or spread sheet.
• The CMP Bulk Emailer costs  $40.00 USD . Some ListServ software is free, though you require a costly webserver to run it on. Most costs over  $150.00 USD and is considerably more complex to manage.

How It Works

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, or you might export it from your client database. [Abundance is just a computer language for writing database applications with extensive validation of data. It is relevant only if you don’t already have a database.] You database should give you the ability to select the people by various criteria to spin off to send a letter to.

The list is technically called a CSV (Comma Separated Value) Comma Separated Value list. Entries look like this:

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

Recovering

Prerequisites

1. You need two standard SMTP/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 accounts from someone who has extras they are not using. I repeat these are two perfectly ordinary email accounts, nothing special about them at all. 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 already familiar with their peculiarities.
2. 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.

3. You need a Pentium/AMD class PC (Personal Computer) or better, capable of running Java. I would recommend having 1 GB or more of RAM (Random Access Memory). You are not limited to running on W2K/XP/W2003/Vista/W7-32/W7-64 machines, though it will be simpler if you are. The bulk emailer will run on anything that supports Java version 1.5 or later and JavaMail, e.g. Linux. 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.

4. If, Bulk, the above Bulk Emailer Java application does not work…

   1. This Java application needs 32-bit (not 64-bit) Java 1.5 or later. For best results use the latest 1.7.0_02. If you have both 32 and 64-bit JVMs installed, in the Java Control Panel, configure your 32-bit java.exe as the user JVM and your 64-bit java.exe as the system JVM.
   2. It works under any operating system that supports Java e.g. W2K/XP/W2003/Vista/W7-32/W7-64/Linux/OSX
   3. To ensure your Java is up to date, check with Wassup. First, download it and run it as an application independent of your browser, then run it online as an Applet to add the complication of your browser.
   4. If the above application does not work, check the Java console for error messages.
   5. If the above application does not work, you might have better luck with the downloadable version available below.
   6. If you are using Mac OS X and would like an improved Look and Feel, download the QuaQua look & feel from randelshofer.ch/quaqua. UnZip the contained quaqua.jar and install it in ~/Library/Java/Extensions or one of the other ext dirs.
   7. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, 8 or 9, try another browser. Seriously. Microsoft has taken great pains, over and over, to screw up Java and every other multi-platform standardisation.
   8. If you still can’t get the program working click HELP for more detail.
   9. If you can’t get the above application working after trying the advice above and from the HELP button below, have bugs to report or ideas to improve the program or its documentation, please send me an email at.

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Friendly Email Hosting

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 mailserver 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.

Telus blocks outgoing SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) port 25 traffic. This discourages Telus customers from having email accounts on other servers. This would be a problem if the Telus email account itself had too onerous a quota. Bulk itself does not absolutely require SMTP 25 access to other than one email account, though it does need it for the optional mailserver validation. Further though a private mail server used to greatly speed mailing up, would require SMTP 25 access to outside servers.

The key is to be upfront with your ISP and your email provider about what you plan do, telling them just how many bulk emails you plan to send each day to make sure they have no objections. Otherwise they will interfere and block you in many ways defeating the purpose of the program. They are often concerned that you might up to some sort of spamming.

Configuring

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.

Configuring Details

Costs

I thought you would like to see the prices on this webpage in  CurrCon Applet needs Java 1.5 or later to display prices in your local currency. , but you can change that instantly, thanks to the Canadian Mind Products CurrCon Applet that you too could use on your own website to display prices in any world currency using today’s exchange rates.

• The bulk emailer itself is free. If you are a programmer or have a friend who is, you can probably set it up yourself without my help.
• $40.00 USD for 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
• If you want a custom-written Abundance database to track your members and money, issuing tax receipts etc. that would cost $500.00 CAD to $1000.00 CAD .

Acquiring the Bulk Emailer

Package	Version	Released	Licence	Language	Notes
Bulk Emailer	1.7	2007-08-21	custom configuration	Java	❘ precis ❘ manual ❘ screenshot ❘ browse source repository for the current version of Bulk Emailer. Simple bulk emailer to broadcast emails for charities, churches and clubs. 1,153K zip for Bulk Emailer Java source, compiled class files, jar and documentation to run on your own machine as an application. First install the most recent Java. To install, extract the zip download with WinZip, (or similar unzip utility) into any directory you please, often J:\ — ticking off the use folder names option. To check out the corresponding source from the Subversion repository, use the TortoiseSVN repo-browser to access bulk source in repository with [Tortoise] Subversion client on wush.net/svn/mindprod/com/mindprod/bulk/. After you have installed the jar, you can run it as an application. Type: java -jar J:\com\mindprod\bulk\bulk.jar parms adjusting as necessary to account for where the jar file is. download ASP PAD XML program description for the current version of Bulk Emailer. Bulk Emailer is free. $489.00 US donated so far. If the CMP utilities solved your problem, please donate a buck or two, or donate to one of the charities featured in the footer public service ads throughout the website and get a tax receipt. You are free to use the program as-is without payment. However, it requires programming skill to configuration. The fee is for my time to customise the program for you and help you install it. Check out the prerequisites carefully and email me to discuss your needs before you buy. Non-military use only.

Links

	You can get the freshest copy of this page from:	or possibly from your local J: drive (Java virtual drive/mindprod.com website mirror)
	http://mindprod.com/application/bulk.manual.html	J:\mindprod\application\bulk.manual.html
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