Of all the website projects I have ever done, be they personally or professionally, there is nothing I’ve disliked more than managing the INeedCoffee Newsletter. Every month since April 1999, I’ve gone to my extranet, clicked a few buttons and then fired off a newsletter. Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?
Creating a form to allow users to add or remove themselves from a database table is easy. Making sure they enter a valid email address is also easy. Writing code to send the newsletter is also easy. However, handling bounced emails is a pain. You see there are several reasons an email can bounce: over quota, user has a new email address, server issues or it has been tagged as SPAM. Every server has a different way of telling you the problem.
Preventing stupid users from tagging the newsletter THEY SIGNED UP FOR as SPAM instead of just clicking the subscribe link is impossible. That happened all the time.
Then there was the Earthlink users. They turned on SPAM filters that forced me to fill out a form for each sign up, because they didn’t add the newsletter email address to their OK list. Note: They were reminded to do this before they signed up. Then they turned around and tagged the newsletter as SPAM.
About two years ago, almost every newsletter sent out was rejected as SPAM. After lots of investigation, I discovered my web host didn’t update some certificate authenticating the mail server. They fixed it, but the damage was done. Over 2,000 newsletters going out each month around the world and I have no clue on how many are making it to the recipients. I still get a large number of these each month.
Diagnostic-Code: smtp;554 this mail is rejected by anti-spam system
I’ve never sent a single SPAM from INeedCoffee, yet my server has been deemed guilty. And I don’t have the energy to chase down my accusers. Thanks to Google’s Feedburner, I won’t have to. My long web nightmare is about over. They will convert the INeedCoffee RSS feed into the new INeedCoffee Email Newsletter. I have the same setup here on CriticalMAS and over on Coffee Hero and Deep Fitness.
On June 1st, I will send out the last INeedCoffee Newsletter from our server. Then I’m dropping all the code and tables associated with managing the email newsletter. I’m done. Let Feedburner deal with it.
