I’ve been asked to put together a system for sending bulk email, and I was looking for some pointers on how to set it up.
From what I’ve been told before, I’ll need to set up a queueing system (so the script will be executed by CRON and send out say 100 every 5 minutes), which isn’t a problem. The thing I’m struggling with is how I could set up some kind of system to capture information about how many times the email was opened, whether there were any clickthroughs, determine whether the email bounced etc.
I would recommend using campaignmonitor.com if you can spare a few bucks to send.
It handles click tracking, unique opens, bouncebacks, tracks how many are marked as spam, and ensures a good rate of delivery. It also sends thousands of emails a second.
Alternatively you can use Google Analytics to mark the links for tracking purposes, with url parameters like utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, set with whatever values you like.
If anyone knows how to manage bounceback in PHP I would be keen to hear.