Sending Bulk Mail with Postfix Alias

Question

Level 1

6 points

Sending Bulk Mail with Postfix Alias

my company is sending a hard postcard to our current and target clients advertising the new services we have to offer. they also what to send a mass email to about 200 addresses at the same time. i am hessitant using a postfix alias to addresses not in our domain.
is there a way to tag the email so mail servers do not concider it as spam and i do not get my ip blocked? anything else i need to do on the postfix end to prevent the mail treated as spam. this is pretty much one time deal, we are not gonna be sending constantly emails.
or should i just use a service for that?
thanks
martin

PowerBook G4 - 12", Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Mar 5, 2007 10:44 AM

Reply

Answer 1

pterobyte

Level 6

11,104 points

Mar 5, 2007 11:19 AM in response to mmmitev

Martin,

not sure where postfix aliases enter the picture?

Anyway, if you send legit mail from a legit mail address of yours to a legit mail recipient, there is no reason your message should be tagged as spam.

You should however avoid sending a single message containing 200 recipients. It's better to send 200 individual messages.

Alex

Reply

Answer 2

mmmitev Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 5, 2007 11:34 AM in response to pterobyte

alex, i was gonna make a text file (alias list) with all 200 clients emails and make a postfix aliases like newservices@ourdomain.com and then send one email instead of 200.
i am just afraid that email server may look at my email as a spam and put my ip in some spam database, so i was wonderign if i can do something so mail servers know it is not spam.
i am looking into services liek this but so far what i have seen is companies offering their email database to send bulk mail to advartise and this is not what we need.
i would look some more i guess and then just send it. i just rememeber 3-4 years ago they have send an email to 300-400 emails and somehow our ip end up marked as a spam, and i am just worried.
thanks
martin

Reply

Answer 3

pterobyte

Level 6

11,104 points

Mar 5, 2007 11:49 AM in response to mmmitev

alex, i was gonna make a text file (alias list) with
all 200 clients emails and make a postfix aliases
like newservices@ourdomain.com and then send one
email instead of 200.

You can do this, but the headers will show the addresses as expanded from your alias. Won't blacklist you, but it is not good practice.

Use mailman instead.

You could also just use Entourage's mail merge feature. Will give you the additional benefit of personalised mail.

Reply

Answer 4

mmmitev Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 5, 2007 12:05 PM in response to pterobyte

i think we will entourage then 🙂 - that will be easy enough for everyone 🙂
thanks a lot.
martin

Reply

Answer 5

David_x

Level 4

3,011 points

Mar 6, 2007 11:33 AM in response to pterobyte

You can do this, but the headers will show the
addresses as expanded from your alias. Won't
blacklist you, but it is not good practice.

Not sure if this is same process as originally proposed but the following does not show all recipients...

In /etc/postfix/aliases...

groupname: :include:/path/to/groupname.txt

In groupname.txt (using plaintext editor)...

name1@some.domain
name2@other.domain

Reload aliases...

# newaliases
# postfix reload

Mail sent to groupname@your.domain gets passed to amavisd once before then being relayed out for each individual recipient.
Mail.log shows "to=<name@recipient.domain>, orig_to=<groupname@your.domain>", for each outgoing mail.

The recipient sees the To: field as being groupname@your.domain. Extended headers show "Delivered-To:" headers for both the groupname and individual recipient.

Certainly not as personal as a merged letter though. I have used only for work groups rather than clients, etc.

-david

Reply