I've modified the one-time only notification feature of the mass mailer so that it now uses the SQL database instead of an access database. I still have to modify the input side of this function (namely the notify.asp page), but I'll put that off until next week. I don't expect we'll need to be using it anytime soon.
Sent out the most recent issue of 2061 Connections. Not much to note here, the mailing seems to have gone off without a hitch. Still, there are some additional changes I'd like to make to the mailing script. Since the quoted-printable encoding of text seems to be working fairly well I think I'm going to implement this on the HTML portion as well. This will have a number of benefits:
- No more worrying about line length
- I can further consolidate and simplify the portion of the script that send out e-mails
- I'll have a little more flexibility in the the e-mail format, etc. as I will no longer need to rely on the CDO engine. I'll still be using a file drop in the IIS SMTP pickup directory, but it seems to be working well enough even at the current distribution of 3800.
On a related note, since communications asked me to add all e-mail addresses from their database for the current mailing of 2061 Connections I was flooded with bad addresses (over 400). I was not too happy to clean out the databases (theirs and mine) since they never seem to do any kind of maintenance on their data. Hopefully once I get a new system in place I'll be able to use VERP or something similar to handle things like this automatically. I've already got an idea of a way I can do this without varying the from address, which is good for a number of reasons, but mostly having to do with spam blocking. If I use the an errors-to header or whatever current "standard" is support by the various mail server I should be able to craft a script to check the drop directory on the server for bounces and such. Then I can implement a form of VERP by using a custom address in this header and keeping track of the returns over time.
