Folks: In 2004, I posted a query about the best way to manage a party invitation email spam list (and the bottom of the posting links to the perl script that resulted). I’m going to put the question forward again because technology keeps changing and spam filters keep getting stricter. A fair number of my messages were spam-filtered, even though they were from: me, to: recipient. I think this might have been because they were sent from an old server and old email address within MIT and a lot of spammers had appropriated that identity.
Here are the requirements:
- I can build a list of email addresses
- I can spam this list with a common message, e.g., “party on Saturday”
- The recipients do not have to visit a Web site to receive the full message, nor deal with a massive pile of HTML and graphics in the email (I believe this requirement rules out the commercial Evite service)
- Message should be plain text readable on a mobile phone
- Messages are not intercepted by spam filters
It would be nice to have the following:
- ability to tag some people with extra information, e.g., “helicopternerds”, and spam only them or spam the list minus them
- recipients can remove themselves from the list
I would have thought that Gmail or Yahoo mail would have something like this built-in. Yahoo seems to have the ability to create a mailing list, but I’m not sure what the resulting messages look like going out. Gmail doesn’t seem to have anything like this (if you say that you want to email a subgroup of contacts it does the obvious stupid thing of adding them all to a big To: list). Could I create a Google Group and stuff all of my friends in it without their consent? Even then it doesn’t seem ideal for managing a social list because I don’t think there are easy facilities for tagging people as belonging to subgroups.
Doesn’t this seem like a sufficiently common problem that it shouldn’t require Unix shell programming?
You can use Gmail — email the invitation to yourself, and BCC it to the group.
If you are willing to use a 3rd party system similar to Evite, I think Socializr (http://www.socializr.com/) might be worth a shot. It sends full event details in the invitation email, and allows the messages to fall back gracefully to plain text (at least from my experience). Invitations are sent from your username@mail.socializr.com, but I’m not sure if that is better or worse for spam filtering.
Check out MailChimp — I think that it actually hits all your requirements and your nice-to-haves. Nice list management, the ability to control whether you do text-only or HTML emails, and all wrapped up in a pretty nice UI. And their free account gives you enough to cover a pretty good sized party each month.
Nowadays for informal invites, I just use Facebook.
🙂
Has anyone pointed you to MailChimp.com yet? I’m not sure if it’s exactly what you had in mind, but the price is right for a smaller list (<500 recipients).
Why not just modify your script to send its emails through gmail? It gives you an open SMTP, just connect to it and you should have your gmail identity for all outgoing messages.
You could create the Google Group and just stuff your friends in the list without their consent. They call it direct invitation or something to that effect. If you take this route of directly adding people, Google might manually review and approve the additions, but in my experience this wasn’t a problem (it just added to the setup time). And if the people you add don’t complain you can continue to do this.
I use Google Groups for this reason (organize events with friends), but it’s ineffective if you want to be able to message subgroups.
Because of the basic lack of good invite tools/sites out there, a few years back (i.e., a millennium in Web years) I created http://www.goovite.com, which allows people to issue very simple, plaintext invites and track the RSVPs online.
It won’t do everything you’re asking for, and it does look like it was designed in a past era – *but* you might like to at least take a look.
I use pingg, however it partially fails your third requirement. Recipients do receive html email, but all of the information (except ability to rsvp) is contained inside the email. I don’t know how it looks on a mobile phone. I don’t know if they send a text counterpart within the email.
Google does have evite-like capability. It’s attached to Google Calendar, however. You create a calendar event, and then you can invite people to it. I’ve never used it, so I can’t say whether or not it fits your constraints.
If you set up a Google Groups list, you can only add a small number of people without asking for their consent. My guess is the maximum number is somewhere in the single digits.
It might seem heavy weight, but any mailing list software will satisfy all of your requirements (and half of your nice-to-haves)…
Most of the packaged ad-hoc solutions (Word mail merge, templates, etc) will do the dumb philg->a,b,c,d,… And shell scripts (or perl, etc) won’t generally let users unsubscribe themselves (it could be done, but you’d be allowing the execution of code based on the receipt of email, and using some of the content of that email as data…you can either work yourself up over whether you can do that securely, or use a proper mailing list processor where at least someone is worrying about it for you).
But, the sticky bits:
– interception by spam filters is entirely a function of the message content and your mail server’s reputation.
– tagging users “helicopternerds” etc and mailing functions of tags is not a feature I’ve ever seen or looked for.
– You do have to install some software (GNU Mailman is the most popular these days), and do a little bit of config to your mail server (for automated delivery gatewaying), and a web server (if you want a web-based configuration and user sub/unsub interface).
I just reread your 2004 post, and someone suggested Mailman then, too. I’ve recently switched to Mailman for a large set of lists, and I won’t claim to like it or anything…but it’s simple and doesn’t require much recurring brain, so I’m satisfied.
Facebook. Email is ruined for this sort of thing. Sad but true.
Perhaps using the calendaring features of outlook to invite people to events would work. Event invites generated by exchange might look less spammy to filters.
I think you’re asking for the impossible. If there were an easy-to-use tool that produced lots of messages that didn’t get caught in spam filters, pretty soon the spammers would catch on and start using it. And the spam filters would adapt in short order.
Phil,
I think the cool kids all gave up trying to solve this problem and have moved to facebook.
The facebook-denier types are the only ones still trying to solve it.
-John ( facebook denier, but who only holds parties small enough for a cc line)
I remember your post because I was looking for a similar capability at that time and ended up with Yahoo Groups. The annoying aspect of Yahoo Groups is the included ad html in each message. Google Groups came on the scene and has all of your requirements but does not have the tagging.
Google Groups: Create the Google group and add members as a list in the group set-up. The Group will have an email address for the name of the group, e.g. partyinvite@googlegroups.com. Google Groups will let you send an email out to the members within the list and allow members to respond to the group members by email. The group can be set-up as members only and the message feature can be set to do not archive. You can add members or send out an invitation to people who you want on the mail list.
I’m surprised that no other people developed a service to similar to Yahoo Groups (and now Google & Windows Live Group). I agree with JohnS that email messaging is in the past with the Facebook, myspace, Twitting.
One would thing that friends, families, clubs (10 to 200 people on the list) would still want some type of email messaging service that is not ad sponsored. This common problem has not gone away.
An aside, is there a service to SMS message a group of people with a notification? “Hey there is frost on the golf course this morning so we will tee-off one hour late”
Is MailChimp one directional or can other people within the list mail the group?
Goovite – Nice one.
i had a dream to rescue email from events. the thought was that email is a task oriented behavior. you either want to respond immediately, delete it immediately or create a due date to handle the email by.
events on the other hand, from friends, should just be added to your calendar, so that when you are looking at your calendar, you can see all of the RSVP dates, and Dates of the events that your friends are inviting you to. Invites should not be messages, but should be semantically included in your calendar.
i started a company social helix to address this problem, an i am looking for new founders. the economy, plus a lack of personal funds tore the company apart, but posts like this give me hope that there is still a marketplace for such a company.