Mass Mailing help needed (Paul Rubin)

[Jeff Shannon]

In article <mailman.1019325819.29016.python-list at python.org>, 
jvanasco at hotmail.com says...
> 
> I work mostly for large entertainment companies -- if you would like so, i 
> can send you to my portfolio and corporate site -- this particular list 
> problem is centered around a record label's website relaunch.  Instead of 
> inundating fans with 1 mailing from 20+  artist lists that they choose to 
> subscribe to, I've decided to merge multiple lists into 1.  Subscribers will 
> get 1 email with general label info, and specific artist news will be 
> provided based on the user's requests.  (Posts will only be about monthly, 
> aside from an 'album release' email that could be offschedule -- but that 
> specific list data is always available)

Well, I don't know Perl, so I can't say anything about how 
Mail::Bulkmail works, nor do I have experience with quite the 
scale that you're intending here, but...  One of my first Python 
projects was an automailer that emails various reports to 
clients, and it has worked fairly well for us.  I keep meaning to 
refactor it to use the new email package, but since it isn't 
broken, the priority on that is low...

I would avoid directly invoking sendmail at all.  My mailer uses 
smtplib to contact the mail server, and this *seems* fairly 
efficient.  Of course, our volume is less than 100 messages per 
day, so my experience may be different -- most of our overhead 
comes in converting raw text data to excel spreadsheets.

Since smtplib functions at a level of individual messages, you'd 
need to write your own bulk-handling utility that uses smtplib 
internally.  I'd think that it should be fairly simple to pass a 
list of email message instances, extract the destination address, 
and send them individually to smtplib.  This might not be 
extremely fast, but if you're sending out such mailings only once 
or twice a month, I suspect that an extremely short running time 
is not a hard constraint.  <wink>

-- 

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International