A possible method would be to make the subject line unique for each distribution list template file. Delivery failure messages always contain this important header.
Martin
I'd like to know some good practices for handling bad addresses returned from distribution lists. My esp limits me to 100 addresses per email (used to be 40). I've split up my email newsletter recipients into about 40 different distribution lists. Each time I send out a newsletter I get some undeliverable mail returned because of bad addresses. I'd like to have a fairly easy way of managing them. I need to:
This involves finding which distribution list (or lists) the recipient is on. I know I can search in individual lists in Pegasus. Is there any way to search through all distribution lists? I could use Notepad++ to search.
I have set up the distribution lists using aliases and divided them up thematically and alphabetically (for the large themes). Reading through the posts here it seems that a good practice is to use only the email addresses. Is there a way to convert aliases to addresses in a distribution list? In converting to email addresses I potentially lose my alphabetization organization (unless I put them all in "Fname Lname" <email@address> form). If I can search through all distribution lists then that won't be a problem.
I understand that I could use Mercury and do a mail merge. Would this be more problematic in terms of my esp limitations on the rate of sending emails? I'd love to hear some good practices for managing distribution lists from some more experienced users. Thanks for all your help.
Pegasus Mail has a very good Mail Merge extension Mlmrge32, that sends out individual messages one at a time and avoids the limitations set by ISPs. It comes as part of the installation of Pegasus Mail. If you want to check into this, read the help file which is small and concise.
The other advantage is that any delivery failures are returned to you individually, so you can filter them to a folder and work on correcting the problem reported.
The input addresses list can be easily extracted from distribution list files by simply copying all but the first few header lines of the distribution list file.
Martin
Dear Martin, thank you for introducing me to the mail merge extension. I hope you can explain a few things:
How will sending out individual messages avoid the limitations set by ISPs or ESPs? If the emails are sent out individually won't they still be counted against the 60 email/minute limit (300 emails/5 min and no more than 100 at once)? Sending it out this way I think I would have to send them manually and count out 60 emails to send each time slot.
This post has an interesting hidden Pmail feature that seems useful: http://community.pmail.com/forums/post/20109.aspx
Sending out as a distribution list also gives individual delivery failure returns. I have already set a filter to catch these into a directory to be handled. What would be very nice would be a way to extract the address from the return email and put them all in a file. What would be even better would be to be able to have the aliases looked up and removed from the distribution lists (although this is not necessary in every case.
The mail merge extension under the tools menu (and the File>New>Mail merge menu) appears to be obsolete. The new way to do it (since WPmail 4.41 I believe) is right on a tab on the New Mail window. From reading the help manual I believe I can put in the file names of the distribution lists into the data file. This is helpful in that I don't have to cut and paste them into a template individually.
How nice to know about the mail merge feature - I've never used it.
Thanks again!
MailMerge won't help with the time limits you mentioned at your ISP. I guess they are limiting folk to reduce Sp*mming. The only way around this is to set up a batch job that fires out 50 at a time with a suitable "sleep" time between transmissions. It would typically be done over night.
The messages in this case could be stored as Stationery (see Pegasus Mail helpfile).
As for your distribution list maintenance problem, I believe the solution is at hand. You need a new mail filter rule (or a set of them) which detects the rejection message, and an action of "Remove from List" (which identifies the distribution list to delete an item from). This feature is commonly used by Newsgroups and ListServs that require registering email addresses, and therefore need to purge users who have "gone away".
HTH
Martin
Thanks Martin,
This post has a method which will help to space by time how often emails are sent from the que. I haven't looked at doing a windows batch program but that is a possibility.
I've saved my file as stationary so that next time I can just update the subject and body of the message; all the other settings will be preserved.
I cannot find any reference in the helpfile to limiting number of messages to send, but the actual *.PND file does have a parameter Max_Msgs= so there seems to be an undocumented feature here. If this still works, and the polling rate value is set to 5 minutes, you may get what you want. You would need to check the option "send mail before receiving POP3 mail" in the Pop3 definition
Martin
Thanks Martin,
I don't see how the "remove from list" action in a filter will help. It would act on the sender of the returned message. The sender is always the mail server (e.g., mailer-daemon@perfora.net). The address we want removed from a distribution list is in the body of the returned message (e.g., The message has not yet been delivered to the following addresses: <jbowen@telemetric.net> ). The format the returned address is in depends on the ESP. The address we want does not appear in any of the message headers. Is there a way for WinPmail to harvest addresses in the body of a message? I found out that regular expressions work in Pmail on the body of a message (This is a powerful program - good work Pegasus team) Can Pmail extract text from a message? This I don't know yet.
Also, in removing the email address from the mailing list we are faced with a couple challenges: 1. aliases, 2. Extended email format (e.g, "Joe Bowen" <jbowen@telemetric.net>) Right now I am using the Find-in-Files function in Notepad++ twice; once to find the email address in the address book (which I exported) and in any mailing list files (*.PML), and once to find the alias in any mailing list files.
The "remove from list" action is perfect for using with an "unsubscribe" message generated by the recipient clicking on an unsubscribe link in a message.
I have about 40 mailing lists. To remove an address from the correct list the unsubscribe message must contain the name of the list in the header or body of the mail. First, In the Mail Merge message I need a field for the unsubscribe link that I can populate from the data file. Unfortunately MailMerge cannot resolve fields in links otherwise I could use mailto:info@cvbt-web.org?Subject=Unsubscribe&body=~k2~ and put the mailing list name as field number 2 in the data file.
I would love it if I could put a set of mailing lists in the mail merge data file. Then I would make the "1" field the pml file that the address was in. If a recipient clicked unsubscribe I would get an email with header data which a set of filters could handle. I tried and PMail mailmerge makes Pmail try to open the distribution lists. It actually reads and resolves the aliases in the distribution lists. No emails are added to the que and no emails come to the New Mail folder in a dry run. And there is no error message.
It seems that it just as easy to manually send each distribution list rather than extract the emails from each mailing list and prepare a data file for mailmerge. The only thing missing is a way to identify which mailing list the email came from.
