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[tlug] Making sure people get the message



TLUG,

Apologies if this veers off topic, as it is more about email handling than Linux management.

I am involved in a few different groups which I communicate with via various email methods, such as mailing lists, and mass BCC mailings.

What I've noticed more and more in recent years, is that because of ever increasing anti-spam measures, there are often cases where people don't receive the email I send out. That an email comes from a majordomo mailing list, or is BCC'd to them seems to be a significant factor for a lot of email security systems.

Hotmail is particularly bad when it comes to this, and I wish I could just tell everyone who uses Hotmail to not. But I can't really do that, and in any case, Hotmail is certainly not the only offender.

In cases where I'm communicating regularly with a group, this problem is overcome eventually because if someone is not getting my messages, they'll say "hey, I never heard from you about X". In that case I can respond directly and say "well, make sure your spam settings aren't blocking me". They'll then discover that my email is in their junk mail folder. Thereafter it's not an issue.

However, I am wrapping up a project that requires I send out one last email, with some very important closing information. I have a duty here to try my best to ensure that everyone gets this email, and I want to make every effort to ensure that everyone gets it.

Because this last email going out is going to a group that I reach very infrequently, and that I'm mailing from an email address most of them don't already have, I'm worried that if I BCC it or use majordomo, up to 30% may not get it. And they aren't necessarily expecting this particular message, so I can't rely on anyone contacting me to alert me that they haven't got it. Nonetheless, it is certain that they would want to receive the information I have for them, as it informs people of the results of the project that everyone worked very hard on.

It seems that what I need to do is ensure that my email isn't dismissed as a mass-email scam, is to have some way of ensuring that it has a proper "To:" and "From:" so that it looks like a direct, one to one, mailing. And at the same time, I want to respect people's privacy by not just throwing all the email into the "To:" field.

In the case of one of my groups, I use a PHP script that reads all the emails from a database, and sends them out one by one. I would have thought that would do the trick. But it turns out that for some reason those emails also get marked as spam. About a third of new members who sign up initially complain that they don't get the message.

So, does anyone have any idea of any scripts, tricks, or anything so that I can feel reasonably sure that my email won't be stopped by overly enthusiastic anti-spam measures?

We're talking a list of about 100 people. I could do it one by one over time with some copying and pasting. But... well, weren't computers invented to remove the repetition of tasks like this?

Any advice or information would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

--
Dave M G
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
Kernel 2.6.17.7
Pentium D Dual Core Processor
PHP 5, MySQL 5, Apache 2


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