Sending Lots of Emails

customaware

I have a situation where at a particular point in time I need to send an email to between 1 and 36 customers and each Customer may have between 1 and 10 different recipients. Obviously each email is tailored to that specific customer so each is different.

So, it is possible to need to send, like 360 emails. This basically halts use on the app while that is happening as it is not possible to run an email sending process in the background.

All emails are html emails.

Has anyone had experience in getting around this situation?

I noticed a thread that discusses options like SMTP2Go and JangoMail but I suspect they are for when you want to send the same email to 100s of people.

Any ideas or comments would be appreciated.

hpl123

Yes, I have done a solution where I send a lot of email (around 5000 individual i.e different people and content email) and there are a couple of things to consider.

First of all, I try to do as much as possible in Aware so not using any external SMTP (and I would rather have Awaresoft improve the current solution if something is missing instead of using some external solution and in the end improving the Aware toobox. I would love to have features like READ, OPENED COUNT, FORWARDED etc. etc. stats in Aware and is possible via some external solution but again, I much prefer to do it all directly in Aware.).

When it comes to sending large amounts of email, the run in background thing you mention is one problem and another is certain SMTP service providers don´t allow you to send 5000 emails within 1 minute for example which made me create a solution where I do the following (rough outline):

Created a EmailBatch BO which holds a list of all customer, the actual email that is to be sent and various other information relevant to the email. The EmailBatch BO has PreProcessCustomer and ProcessedCustomer references list (Customer BO) which I use to break down the large batch to smaller batches effectively sending a minibatch every 5 minutes. The EmailBatch BO also has a flag SendOK which is used to indicate if the EmailBatch is complete (all emails sent) or not (and also as a failsafe used in error management to pick up potential errors with batch).
Set up a scheduled rule/process which checks every 5 minutes (during office hours) if there are any EmailBatch instances in the system with EmailBatch.SendOK='No' and if it is, takes x amount or customers and sends the email to them (takes them one by one and create individualised email and sends it) and at the same time, move the newly processed customers from the PreProcessCustomer to the ProcessedCustomer list.
The user writes the email and see it go away immediately (or so they believe i.e they don´t know about this solution so might need to be informed about "delay" in sendout etc. and also have some indicator of SendOK).

Works like a charm 🙂.

ACDC

Works like a charm

Good concept, this is like drip sending, something that emulates transaction sending will keep you safe from being listed as a spammer.

customaware

hpl123 wrote
Created a EmailBatch BO which holds a list of all customer, the actual email that is to be sent and various other information relevant to the email. The EmailBatch BO has PreProcessCustomer and ProcessedCustomer references list (Customer BO)

Thanx Henrik,

How do I get Aware to generate the email and then attach it to a BO Instance?

tford

I use Mandrill, a service of MailChimp. Just this week I sent >500 emails that all included customized content including a link for users to click into my BSV and click whether the family wanted a conference with 8 different teachers. The screen they logged into via the link (password embedded & encrypted) had the 8 teachers / classes listed that were specific to their child.

All the emails sent via a process in the background. I can share more about the processes and email building if you need it, Mark.

Jaymer

eagles9999 wrote
This basically halts use on the app while that is happening as it is not possible to run an email sending process in the background.

This really wouldn't be an issue if not for the Upcloud email bug.
Sending only 36 emails should still only be a few seconds (the CCs are handled by the mail server)

customaware

Thanx Henrik and Tom.

Got it working... Excellent.

Jaymer

eagles9999 wrote
Thanx Henrik and Tom.

NP - Happy to Help 😛

customaware

Sorry, did not see yhour reply Jaymer.

Well..... on any server, sending 360 emails is going to be an issue.

This solution totally gets around the UpCloud issue. Works really well.

Jaymer

eagles9999 wrote
This solution totally gets around the UpCloud issue. Works really well.

What solution exactly did you do?