One of the Internet's most powerful functions is electronic mail. E-mail allows a site like BridgePath to send out thousands of job announcements every day and allows a company like Human Ingenuity to do a targeted promotional offers to its customers. E-mail can give you a quick and cheap way to make contact with your customers.

With all the talk of the world wide web, Java, and Internet telephony -- electronic mail is still the best means of communicating ideas directly to customers, clients, and colleagues. What e-mail lacks in two-way interaction it makes up in simplicity and effectiveness.

You can send targeted electronic mail directly to people in your database by building a query with off-the-shelf tools from companies like Netscape, Allaire, NetDynamics, Microsoft, and others. For example, take a site where you have a login and a password for members. As the site operator, you want people to return often -- so you might send a message to all your members that have not logged into the site in the last month. Something like:

          From = "bob@EMAILisCool.com"
          To = "Recipient's E-Mail"
          Subject = "Have not logged in"
          
          Dear "First Name",
          
          We noticed you haven't logged into EMAILisCool since
           and we thought that you might benefit 
          from our new content.
          
          Just a reminder, your LoginID is .
          
          Please visit http://www.EMAILisCool.com today.
          
          Thank you.
          
          Bob Smith
          EMAILisCool 
          http://www.EMAILisCool.com
          bob@EMAILisCool.com
          ----
          This message was sent to "Recipient's E-Mail"

In this example, we might mail all the people that have signed up to be members of the EMAILisCool site -- but not including people that have signed up in the last 3 months or that have logged into the site in the last month. Basically, we want to mail reminders to members that were once interested in the EMAILisCool site but have now lost interest or forgot about the site. We don't want to lose these old customers and we want to get them back to the site.

Notice the mail message. The first thing you will see is that it comes directly from Bob Smith and not from some general mailbox. You want the mail message to be as personalized as possible (hence the addition of the customer's first name) and people like to get mail from other people -- not from some random system.

One nice feature that I like is when companies include the e-mail address the message was sent to at the end of the e-mail message. I have over 40 e-mail addresses and most of them forward to the same spot -- so it is nice to see what e-mail address I used when I registered at a particular site.

Also notice the URL is listed twice and the URL begins with "http://". I hate getting URL's without the "http://" because then I can't click on them directly from the e-mail client. Does the sender actually expect me to copy and paste the URL? The objective of this e-mail message is to get the customer to visit the web site -- so make it as easy as possible for her.

Sending out a message like the one above is guaranteed to get you more traffic to your site.

Of course e-mail is not without its quirks, negatives, hardships, or flaws. One big problem is that if you have a slow mail server, sending mass mail can be a real drain on your server. If you are sending out 20,000 e-mails a day, like we do at BridgePath, this could be a real problem. Many languages like Cold Fusion and ASP can be very processor intensive for mail and might take over 95% of your CPU power with a slower server.

When I say mass mail I don't mean "spam." I hate spam and do not condone it. I mean sending out relevant information to people that actually signed up for it and where you are honest about your intentions, the e-mail address the mail is coming from, and you personalize the message.

You can't totally remedy this problem, but you can take two steps to minimize the consequences.

1. GET A FASTER ALTERNATIVE MAIL SERVER

If you are using MS Exchange as a mail server for mass e-mails you are in for long waits, lots of wasted processing power, and low performance. Though MS Exchange and other bulky mail servers are great for personal and corporate mail -- they are generally too large for mass mails.

Keep your current mail server for your corporate mail and have another mail server for your mass mail. Use a more simple mail server like Software.com's Post.Office or you might even try something more vanilla. Bouncing mass mails off a simpler mail server will allow for less overhead and will perform much faster. Mail servers like MS Exchange have sophisticated error checking and usually can't send out more than one or two e-mail messages per second. By contract, simpler mail servers can send out 10 times that.

Of course, if you really want high performance you are going to have to build a custom mail server. PlanetAll, the contact management site that sends out 100,000's of e-mails every day, uses a custom made mail server that is awesomely fast.

2. SCHEDULE MASS MAILINGS FOR OFF-PEAK HOURS

For sites that send out lots of bulk mail, scheduling was made for you.

Scheduling or cron jobs allow a programmer to schedule a task. You can therefore send out mail during off-peak hours when presumably you have some processing power to spare.

Allaire's newest release, Cold Fusion 3.1, has a scheduling feature built in called CFSCHEDULE.

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