Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Two and a half weeks it took. But finally, I’ve got a decent Newsletter system set up that should work.

I cancelled Dewahost (they were nice about it - but I still wonder why they never responded to my queries) and signed up with LuxSci’s High Volume SMTP service.

Then I went about trying to set up some newsletter templates for phpList to work with it. I complained about the user interface of phpList a few blog posts ago. Now I needed to customize the inner workings of phpList to work with my list my way. Then I realized it wasn’t just the user interface of phpList that was terrible. The code itself was just as bad. There was no way I wanted to work with it. Sometimes, this is what happens to Open Source tools, and it’s often better to buy one that one person develops and has a stake in.

So a bit of research and I came up with Simple PHP Newsletter System (SPNS). It’s smaller and simpler and has code I can read that I can customize where needed.

I converted its database over to use my user list, and hooked it up to use LuxSci. It took about a week to get that working. Apparently I hadn’t fully registered the Behold bounce email address with LuxSci, but once that was done, test newsletters started flowing.

Now I had to redo a template for the look of the Newsletter. This would serve double-duty and also be the template for Behold’s help file. SPNS pointed me to a very nice template that I looked at and fell in love with. I purchased it. But when I tried it out, the background and graphics file was made up of big graphic files. I wanted to minimize those in my emails. And I didn’t have the graphic skills to convert my website header into something that would work with that design.

So I took that template and used parts of it and ended up with a cross between the old newsletter, the help file and the new website. It’s simple and clean and keeps my light blue and yellow pastel backgrounds - which add a bit of softness. I think that is better than grey text which does the same thing but is harder to read.

Finally I had to change my subscribe, purchase and unsubscribe scripts to work with the new system. Then I tested the newsletter system and see that the bounce handling works.

It seems close to ready to go. Next I’ll write up my newsletter and send it out and I’ll be off and communicating again.

After I got phplist up and working, and I cleaned my old survey respondents email addresses up, I purchased a Dewahost’s SMTP service package to send the mail. They were recommended by Plimus (who processes Behold purchases for me) and do mailing lists for Plimus, so I assumed that was a good enough reference and I went with them.

Sorry, Dewahost, but this is not going to be a nice post for you.

When I purchased the service, I sent them a note with the purchase asking them for the SMTP setting so I could send out the Behold News newsletter. I waited a day with no response. I then sent an email to them and waited 3 more days. Nothing.

Being very patient, and assuming nothing, I submitted a support ticket on their support site. Someone there responded on the ticket only 9 minutes later that he’s forwarding my ticket to their sales team who will be able to assist me better. I then responded that it was not a sales issue, but a technical issue. Three days later. No response at all on that ticket. I then went to their online chat.

I had a pleasant talk and was told that they’d give my ticket a higher priority. That night, they responded to my ticket. They said: “We didn’t receive your order. What’s the order reference number?”.  Now I’m starting to get frustrated and I posted my whole Plimus receipt from what was already 10 days earlier.

Two more days went by and I went on chat again. The friendly fellow apologised and added a new ticket for me that was quite forceful and said that if they cannot handle this order, to let me know so I can look into other providers and a refund.

That was yesterday. Today I got no response on either ticket. So I’m now looking at other providers of a non-spam bulk email SMTP service. I found a few possibilities:

Authsmtp does not appear too bad.  They charge about 0.2 cents per address and that goes down to about 0.13 cents as the volume increases.

Sendblastersmtp looks good. They’re a little more starting at 0.3 cents (which is the same level that Dewahost starts at) and going down to 0.2 cents. But at the high end they have a dedicated server offer for $300 a month. They have bulk emailing software that looks good and might be useful for those who need it. But I expect I’ll be happier with phplist running from my ISP, rather than trying to maintain my list myself on my own PC.

Dewahost has an unexpected pricing scheme. It starts out high at 0.3 cents per address and decreases until for $40 a month, you have unlimited emails. *Alarm Bells* - The word unlimited never means unlimited. There’s got to be something that they’ll impose if you start using “too much”. Also, they do not have dedicated servers for this “unlimited” plan, so there is an uncertain future there when the list gets large.

Of all the companies, the one that now seems the best to me is LuxSci. They seem very professional. Their prices surprisingly start lower, at 0.1 cents per address but grow to 0.18 cents as the volume increases. But then they have a dedicated server offering at only $200 per month which I can move to once Behold News starts going out to 100,000 or more people. They also have a free bounce analysis that will promptly remove invalid email addresses from my list. I was planning on doing that with phplist, but it would be better to offload that where it won’t slow down the Behold website.

If I don’t hear back from DewaHost by tomorrow night (and maybe even if I do), I think I’ll sign up for service with LuxSci. Then hopefully I can restart the Behold News newsletter and send it out to everyone over the weekend.

In the meantime, I have been making good progress on the log files and probably will have another beta out in a couple of weeks.

Before the first Alpha of Behold came out in March 2005, I had a survey up which you can still see at archive.org. (Don’t you just love the color I used to use?) Between 1997 and 2004, 685 of the people who filled in that survey said “Yes” to the question “Does the concept of a program like Behold interest you?” and also gave me their e-mail address. I promised to myself that when I release the beta of Behold, I would email them back and let them know.

Well, the beta of Behold is available, and I’m finalizing the Newsletter so I am just about ready to send out that letter. Just one thing to do: verify that those email addresses still exist. I do not want to send out 600 emails and have a lot of them bounce back. It could blacklist me and/or make my ISP very unhappy with me.

So then the journey to do that began. I found out that there is no perfect way to do so. Even sending an email may bounce back because an account is just suspended or a mailbox is full. Without sending an email, it is even trickier. The main method used that does the best job under the circumstances is to set up an SMTP call to the mailserver at the domain of the email address, and send it a HELO and RCPT command. You can sort of see how this works at a Free Email Address Verifier.

So I found a number of articles on how to do this and set up PHP code to do the verification. That took a couple of days. But when I ran it, it didn’t work. It took me another couple of days before I found out that the reason was my website host blocked port 25 where SMTP goes as a spam prevention policy. The research told me there’s no way around that. Find a host who doesn’t block it. So next I tried running it from PHP on my own machine. That would go through my ISP here in Winnipeg who gives me my internet access. Nope. Port 25 blocked here as well.

Without doing the SMTP checks, only 15 of the 685 addresses could be proven wrong. The rest were unknown. I knew there were a lot more than that. So I needed something with the SMTP checks. Downloading an email verification program didn’t help. They need port 25 as well.

Finally I was able to write a routine that accessed an online email checker and check the emails one by one. I was willing to pay for this service, but I could not find one that would do it in a batch online manner for me. So here goes, a one shot check of 685 addresses. Painful but necessary.

As I write this, I’m about half way through. Looks like about 45% of the email addresses from back then were good. That will make about 300 of them. Was all this effort worth it? Now that I look back, possibly not. But I didn’t know it at the time.

I have to wait to hear back from the SMTP mailing service I signed up for to know how to configure phplist to use them for my newsletter, so it will still be a few days before the newsletter is sent.

So tomorrow it’s back to work on Behold - let’s get that log file working.