Problems Sending Bulk Email

[yokito]

My wife runs a small business from home and has recently moved off eBay. We have chosen Filemaker Pro as our database backend for customers and orders. However, we are experiencing problems running email campaigns against her customer base.

So, we do have a business email account (google apps) but getting the emails out is an issue. OS X mail certainly doesn't seem to be up to it - it crashes frequently, sometimes after spooling only a few messages. Thunderbird doesn't seem to work at all, asking for a re-install of Filemaker - this is Thunderbird 9.0.1 with Filemaker 11.04 on OS X 10.7.2.

Using SMTP seems to work better at times, but isn't reliable either. Getting <1k emails took me all afternoon the other day. I understand that I probably have to buy a plugin, like SMPit. Are those plugins smarter in getting the emails out? I read SMTP scales? I also have read that the ISP could be an issue, however - we are trying SMTP now with our business email account - can our ISP still be an issue? We are not talking tons of emails here, not even what our business email account would allow which is like 2k emails a day. It's actually substantially less than that. We do send attachments that are typically somewhere between 800k and 1.5mb.

What plugins or email clients are you using?

Edited January 30, 2012 by yokito

[Ron Cates]

I wouldn't use FileMaker's SMTP as it is a known issue that filemaker does not properly format the header which results in many email providers like HotMail and GMail rejecting the emails or at the vary least sending them straight to the spam folder. We have been waiting for a fix for a long time with no word. The problem essentially renders FileMaker's SMTP useless for us.

[yokito]

We just purchased MaxBulk - any opinions about that one? It seems very flexible.

[VincentO'B]

I have used SMTPit plug- in, works well.

The attachment size will certainly slow things down, your bottleneck is likely to be your upload speed to your ISP and any traffic management by your Mail provider and or ISP.

You can get around some of this by building your own mail server and running it on your network, not trivial but if you are sending large amounts of mail well worth the effort.

Another option is a commercial SMTP service but if it is your upload speed causing the issue then this may not help.

Regards

[labyrinthian]

Hi,

I know this is an old thread, but I'm just wondering if anyone has experience with seedcode's fmspark for sending bulk emails? any votes?

[[email protected]]

For this email sending problem, you can install a good email sending software and you can get it through searching on the web. Email sending software will solve all problem which face during send bulk email.

[Ron Cates]

I wouldn't use FileMaker's SMTP as it is a known issue that filemaker does not properly format the header which results in many email providers like HotMail and GMail rejecting the emails or at the vary least sending them straight to the spam folder. We have been waiting for a fix for a long time with no word. The problem essentially renders FileMaker's SMTP useless for us.

We have upgraded to FM 12 and I got around to testing filemaker's SMTP last night. I was excited to find that this issue has finally been fixed. I tested sending to Hotmail, gmail and every other one I could find to send a test to and all of them went through without a hitch. Yay!