How to run a bulk mailing campaign

In order to send an email to a single recipient, you can use an ordinary email client such as Outlook, Thunderbird, or Gmail. Such email clients are very good at managing private correspondence.

But what if you need to send an advertisement or a notification of new features to all of your web portal users at the same time? Each of them should see only his or her address in the recipient list and be unable to view the addresses and names of other users.

This can be done even by means of ordinary email software, though not too convenient, with significant time expenses, and the risk to make a mistake when copying the names and email addresses of your subscribers. To perform the same task within several mouse clicks, it is enough to make use of the functionality provided by WebAsyst Contacts and WebAsyst Mail, as described below:

1. Use WebAsyst Contacts to create a subscribers database, i.e. the people who have expressed their willingness to receive email messages from you. It can be done through the use of signup form widgets (click on the "Create a Widget" link to create a signup form). If you already have a list of email addresses stored outside of WebAsyst Contacts, you can quickly import them (use menu item "Contact... -> Import...").
2. If different groups of subscribers are supposed to receive different mailing, you can arrange them as lists (use menu item "List... -> Add List"). Note that each subscriber can be included into several lists.
3. Compose a new message with WebAsyst Mail (select menu item "Compose message" or "Message... -> Compose from template..."). Instead of entering each email address in the "To" field, click on the "Lists" link under that field and select the necessary contact list.

Selecting a contact list is equivalent to typing all recipients' email addresses one by one  contained in it. In this way you can select from 1 to several hundreds of subscribers with significant time economy.

4. Send out the message by clicking on "Save".

The message will be sent to each subscriber whose email address is contained in the list.

IMPORTANT: Sending a message to a large number of recipients may require significant resources of your web server! Should the performance or the configuration of the web server be insufficient for this task, then your message will be sent only to some of the specified addresses. To ensure that your messages are always successfully sent, a cron job must be set up prior to mailing. In this case a message will be periodically sent to the remaining recipients every hour, until it is sent to all of them.

Note: Only default email address for each recipient will be used. If a contact has multiple email addresses, only first email is considered as default and will be used for bulk messaging.