Hi All

I need to send a regular bulk email for an association of about 2000 members. The list of addresses is in Postgres and easy enough to extract.
I could write script to simply loop through the list and attach the mail text. However, why re-invent the wheel if its already out there.

So can anyone recommend any free scripts, applications or tools for batch email processing on Linux.

PS. Each email should be individually addressed. I don't want long recipient lists included within any emails.



Thanks in advance.

Charlie101

Just engage a marketing service to send them out for you. Or, better yet, set up a web page (Weebly makes it both easy and free) for your 2,000 members to regularly visit.

Or, how about a Facebook page?

As for me, I get about 400-500 "junk" emails a day, and, obviously, not a single one of them gets read, or ever will. (GMail filters out over 97% of all the traffic that it receives.) Therefore, I don't consider email to be a viable way for people to remain in contact anymore.

Hi sundialsvcs

Thanks for your reply. Especially the part about gmail. I know spam filtering is an issue but I didn't know that the gmail filter was that high.

The email shot is only one contact method and these are all opted in subscribers. We have a website, blogs and are setting up forums.
We still want the email as a reminder trigger. Many of our members are Mature and Facebook is not that popular although I'm sure will still be useful.

Anyway my original question remains and we don't have much of a budget which is why we are looking for free Open Source software.

Charlie101

Honestly, that's what I'd do.

Maybe try something like openemm. You can do news letters email marketing etcc from what their website says.

Yes that is the fall back position. But the commercial options do offer quite bit of added value. Hence I'm looking to see if any of that is available open source. Even if we end up paying some money for support or whatever. Currently we are paying £30 for 500 emails each shot. We'd like to increase the email but the cost would be too high.

Plus I want to integrate the email database with the main members database which means bringing it onto our server.

Hi ericson007

Thanks for your post. Openemm looks really interesting It could be just what we are looking for.
Do you use it?
Do you know if it works 'easily' with Postgres rather than MySQl

Honestly i don't use it but newsletters is something i am looking at as well. I was just looking for something because the thread prompted me. So sorry, no experience with it.

Not to worry.
Thanks for the tip anyway; very useful.

I've also found 'phpList' on sourceforge.net which look interesting.
I dare say there are also a number of others on there.