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.