From 2 very Anonymous Cowards:
Two of us volunteer to manage a private website with about 700 members, constantly rotating in and out (they are mostly undergrad students). For this we use low cost webhosting and recently found out that the email account (same ISP & domain name) only allows 60 outgoing emails/hour. Thus when we want to email the whole membership (a couple of times per year) we are going to have to break the list into a dozen pieces.
It would be nicer if we could submit the whole list at once. We don't mind if the emails are sent "drip feed" with one going out every minute or so.
Anyone ever seen anything like this? I tried a few search strings and didn't find anything, but my Google-fu may be bad today.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by mrpg on Sunday October 23 2016, @03:56AM
https://www.phplist.org/ [phplist.org]
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Sunday October 23 2016, @11:15AM
Bad idea — using spam software is likely to get your mails rejected, get you onto blacklists, etc. Just use that one-liner mail;sleep loop and you're set.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @12:38PM
Have you ever installed it?
It is opt-in.
Each sent mail has unsubscribe headers and the unsubscribe link.
You install it in your server.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @04:00AM
There are a ton of commercial emailers that have free tiers that would be good enough for what you've described.
Check out these for starters, I've used them both and they are pretty easy:
https://elasticemail.com/pricing [elasticemail.com]
https://mailchimp.com/pricing/free/ [mailchimp.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Sunday October 23 2016, @11:59AM
Or outsource it to contractors in Russia. I know I guy who can pump upwards of 100M emails/hour using other people's HP printers, webcams, and Samsung fridges all over the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @01:02PM
People gave their email addresses for the purposes of the MEMBERS communicating with the HOST. You're suggesting that the host hand over his entire list of members' email addresses to some cut-rate spam outfit?
You gotta be some kind of genius.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @01:38PM
Terms of service for both of those sites explicitly forbid them from stealing your addresses. That applies to the free tiers as well as the paid ones. I seeded my address lists with honeypots. They have not received any spam.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @04:06AM
(cat /tmp/list|while read foo;do cat /tmp/spam|mail $foo;sleep 60;done) &
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:00PM
Exactly. This is a question easy enough for my 70 years old mother to solve by herself. Goddamn this Eternal September and all the Micro$oft power users who struggle to even change the background image...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @04:21AM
If you have access to a Linux bash shell, someone could write a simple bash script that reads email addresses from a list/file, sends an email from the command line, sleep 60, repeat.
Example:
MAILER=/path/to/your/mail/program
for ADDRESS in `cat membership_emails.txt`
do
date;
echo "Sending to $ADDRESS..."
$MAILER -s "Subject is a message to membership" $ADDRESS the_email_message.txt
sleep 60
done
There are potential ways this could be broken; this code untested.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Sunday October 23 2016, @04:27AM
Honestly, depending on an ISP for mail service tends to be a bad idea in the long run because a lot of them are rather cheaply run and you run into crud like them filtering messages and such. If you can control the MX records of your domain, you're best off grabbing exim/postfix, and setting it up yourself. This gives you full control of your mail infrastructure, and as a bonus, you can run your own plugins like SpamAssassin or SMIME/Milter.
Failing that, I believe Postfix has an outgoing limiter on how much mail it sends on one; you could use that and the smarthost option to dump all the mail into Postfix and it will slowly spool outbound over time. best of luck!
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @04:53AM
This and I would add if it is *really* important. Just buy some email service from someone. The last company I worked for we used ms office365 for a long time. The dudes in that org were NOT shy about emails. I could easy get 500 in 1 day, and that was not uncommon. Think the price was pretty reasonable too. There are several other companies you can buy this sort of service from.
Farting around with email for fun can be just that. But when you want to do a group of people and at a good pace just buy it. It is one less thing you have to fart around with. Roll your own is fine when you are small. But eventually you get to the point where you should hire someone to do just that.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday October 23 2016, @06:41AM
Many home users' IPs are blacklisted (https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx) and can't be used to run their own SMTPs.
There's no easy way around it: You either own a server with a commercial static IP address that you can send messages from or you end up having to relay. And often enough, relaying means losing control over your From field.
Personally, I relay incoming faxes with a raspi hylafax\postfix server to gmail\1&1 accounts (relayhost=[smtp.gmail.com]:587 or relayhost=[smtp.mail.com]:465) using the usual CA issued keys (smtp_use_tls=yes). To make things private*, I encrypt the actual messages with a personal PGP key-pair. However, it means I need to use a client (thunderbird) to read the messages.
*so google \ GMX \ someone guessing my account password won't be able to go through my mail. I leave the "the phone company \ government is reading my fax" paranoia to someone who actually cares about it.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @02:23PM
> Many home users' IPs are blacklisted (https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx) and can't be used to run their own SMTPs.
This.
But not only that, even if you aren't officially blacklisted you may find yourself grey-listed such that the big email services will score your email as more likely to be spam. So if there is anything else about your message that bumps up the spam score you are much more likely to end up in the junk folder.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday October 23 2016, @08:19PM
They said they're using cheap web hosting.
DigitalOcean offers VPSs for $60 a year, and that's not the cheapest offering available. It can host a web server and SMTP server easily.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2, Informative) by speckled on Monday October 24 2016, @04:37AM
By far the cheapest VPS offer I know is ArubaCloud (1€ per month for 1GB RAM, 20GB SSD). I have two servers (Backup MX, VPN) there for a few months now, one in Italy and in Czech Republic, had no problems yet and, surprisingly, performance has also been great. Can't say anything about customer support, though.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @05:02AM
This is the OP.
What a great community--in an hour after posting I've got a bunch of good ideas to follow up. Thanks everyone!
(Score: 1) by RS3 on Sunday October 23 2016, @05:23AM
If it's Linux you might set up a cron.hourly job. I use PostFix and SendMail. I don't have much time to search (but you can) but I did a quick search on "postfix limit quantity send" and I found these (and there are tons more):
http://steam.io/2013/04/01/postfix-rate-limiting/ [steam.io]
http://www.postfix.org/TUNING_README.html/ [postfix.org]
http://www.hsc.fr/ressources/cours/postfix/doc/rate.html/ [www.hsc.fr]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by edIII on Sunday October 23 2016, @05:46AM
I've seen something like on occasion while provisioning mail servers. It's not a terrible idea either, but does assume something about the customer that doesn't apply in this case. For normal people, they might not send more than 60/hour. I've also seen variations that limit total addresses in an email too.
I would suggest simply asking the ISP to raise it on your account, as the limit may be account based and not server based. If they're doing it for anti-SPAM reasons, then thank them for the neat idea (be nice) but say that you're use case requires you to send out membership advisories a few times per month and if they could raise it to 1,000 that still sufficiently cuts the legs off any hackers/spammers/assholes that compromise their webserver.
Barring that, I suggest that piece of Unix code or the bash script on your webserver to break it up. If you want a bigger solution than that, then create an email server using virtual hosting and set it up well (rDNS records, SPF, DKIM). That can still be low cost ($20/mo), and have a nice mail server that other mail servers are less likely to reject.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @01:55AM
> asking the ISP to raise it on your account,
Bingo, thanks! Don't know why we didn't think of this -- will try it first. These mailings to all ~700 members only go out two or three times a year. The rest of the time the email traffic might be a few messages per day.
- OP -
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 30 2016, @03:22AM
Success!!
A simple request to our ISP and they raised our one-day limit to 500 emails (no hourly limit as initially). It's no problem to split our list in half and send two batches over two days. And as noted initially, we only do this 2-3 times per year. Problem solved, thanks again for all the suggestions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Appalbarry on Sunday October 23 2016, @06:03AM
Not free, but you can set up a group mailing list via Google Apps - um G Suite now?
Anyhow, at:
https://groups.google.com/ [google.com]
Honestly kind of an irritating interface, but once it's up and running pretty painless.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @07:16AM
quit being a fucktard and use an enterprise solution. also, remind me not to hire you in the future.
(Score: 4, Informative) by NotSanguine on Sunday October 23 2016, @07:17AM
But Dada Mail [dadamailproject.com] will do what you want. It ca also do much, much, more.
If you don't need (or want) anything more, then scripting is probably your best option.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @09:03AM
after 7 of them no one can track you, don't ask how I cloned her and got her to type things for me..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Sunday October 23 2016, @02:11PM
Get a better ISP.
They should offer you an SMTP server not subject to such ridiculous limits (Hell, I send more than 1 email per minute doing a working day!).
If all else false, mark your domain as allowing sending from some third party host (SFP, etc.) and do it yourself via a cheap VPS (£10 a month or less) or with an online mailing list manager
Drip-sending email is pointless if you have 700 members.
(Score: 1) by Bodger on Sunday October 23 2016, @11:19PM
The provider is able and may be willing to increase your limits.
I work for a company in that industry and know that can be done.
(Score: 1) by jman on Monday October 24 2016, @11:35AM
phpmailer - https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer [github.com] - supports rate limiting.