www.VitalComputerServices.Info -- Bulk Email

My first experience with bulk email was back in 2003, a colleague of mine who had his own business and
band (he always collected emails from the crowd) and ask me to setup a system to send mass emails ads
To his fans and to his existing business clients.

I purchased a package after using the demo for a couple of weeks, it seem to work well, although it only sent out
about a thousand an hour, which is ok, since he had only about 10,000. The software took
CSV files as input which was good; its interface allowed html entered to create messages just like front page by
MicroSoft, although you had to send a test message to quality control the message before
making a run.

There several processes and step we had to figure out before we could do a real production run.

1. Test the messages for typos, test the music streaming if we wanted to play background music
when the email was delivered, test image quality, test stream quality if we wanted
to test sending a video with the message.

2. Test all the above with the major ISP players (Yahoo, MSN, Google, AOL, Hotmail,
etc etc), this proved interesting because some of the ISP's added or deleted portions of the
HTML code and used their own backgrounds and colors.

3. Test the messages with different browsers

4. And because the laws were changing concerning spam, we had to embed a opt out link
into the messages, and then of course create websites that the opt out links were
directed to, these WebPages contained code that executed programs that collected the email addresses
and stored them into text files, these were then loaded into a table for future
email suppression.

5. We had to create databases to store prospect emails, emails that were sent, emails that
were responded to, emails that were asking to be removed from future emails campaigns,
we had to create programming that cleaned up emails and looked for undeliverable email
addresses, unwanted emails, created programs that converted, extracted and loaded emails from
process to process, web sites to servers etc etc.

6. We experimented with email verification programs, email spider programs for extracting emails
off the internet, marketing ideas for collecting emails, email brokers, wrote programs to collect
return codes for rejected emails, successful emails, problem emails and reports to
help control all this.

We finally got into production with some success, but it took a lot of work.

Years later I joined a company in California called AcquireWeb, which blasted
Hundreds to millions of emails daily and worked with the three big credit bureaus
I learned the business of big blast email processing and the business from cradle to grave.

I was hired as a Data Analyst Consultant from 2008 - 2009 to prepare the data and emails
before the blasting, I worked with millions of records, doing extractions, merges, Joins,
some pretty wild select statement, most of this was done with Microsofts
MS SQL 2005 server, I did some Visual Basic programming, a lot of SQL queries, a lot
of SSIS work bring data up and down from the servers, all ways trying to automate the processes.

wrote a MicroSoft service to poll the ftp directory and start processing data when our clients would drop a data file
into a FTP directory and email them automatically when this process shot off.

I also did a lot of scripting on our Linux servers to collect return code data
during the night and at noon, this allowed us to create reports and send them to our clients
to let them know the progress of their campaigns and let them make crucial decisions
affecting future runs.