John Meier <john.meier at gmail.com> wrote: > I've been tasked with setting up a "bulk emailer". The initial set > of requirements are below (I really like the last one) > > * Able to handle 10K recipient list > * Web interface for admins to manage recipient lists > * Internal smtp server included > * HTML emails supported > * ODBC compliant > * Other things that I haven't thought of yet. > > I spent a lot of time on google searching and checking ou > sourceforge, but most of the stuff I saw was windows based and had > to be pointed to a smtp server somewhere - didn't seem to be any > stand alone systems to do this.. Because I think some of your requirements are unreasonable. It sounds like you're looking for some pre-packaged Operating System, not just a "bulk emailer". The components you want are: email list server, email server, web server, database server, and a web administrative software to tie it all together. There are no shortcuts out there without a cost associated with it. Either you pay for it monetarily or in time (ala FLOSS software). Email, web, and database servers are all easy enough to set up separately. You WANT a list server to do this, and let me tell you why: bounce handling. Bounces are a non-trivial problem for list server software. You can use VERP handling of email addresses and return addresses with any combination of a modern email server and modern list server. The list serve software choice is up to you, but all of them are generally configurable enough that you could make it look like it isn't a list server that's controlling things. You can always strip headers, footers, and "List-" headers from the email. You can set it up so it hides the "From: " header, even, anonimizing the posts. Plus, you can control who can or cannot post quite easily. There are some list servers that allow you to manage lists via an RDBMS (ala ODBC). I believe Mailman is one of them. If you needed to, you could customize the mailman interface or write your own to manage these things. Posting to the list could be done easily enough through simple CGI or even webmail clients, such as squirrelmail. Really, why would you want to force a user to cut-n-paste HTML, when they can simply use their favorite email client to generate the email and send it to the list? -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/ assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */