Inside Technique : Sending an Automated Newsletter
By Scott Isaacs

We have received quite a few requests on how we send our weekly newsletter. So far we largely ignored this question as our solution was so simple and low-tech. Each week we created 10-15 e-mails in Outlook Express, include the appropriate newsletter, specify the newsletter receipients on the BCC line and sent the e-mail.

This approach works very well small newsletter lists (eg, less than 2,000 subscribers) and in many cases may be suitable for your needs. Just remember when using this approach, always put each recipient on the BCC line. This prevents subscribers from seeing each others e-mail address.

However, our newsletter subscriber base is now approaching 19,000 subscribers and we have long since outgrown this approach. As part of our backend upgrade, we are automating the sending of the newsletter. To send the newsletter we are using the built-in SMTP server that ships with IIS 4.0. This appraoch requires you making sure the SMTP server is properly installed on your server. This weeks newsletter (November 1) is the first to use our new system.

We set a few goals for automating the newsletter:

• Automatically send the newsletter to all recipients with "one click"
• Personalize the newsletters
• Simplify the newsletter management process

In this article, we explain how we achieved the first goal and highlight how the second goal can be achieved. We have not yet deployed the personalized newsletter or simplified management process. We will explain that more when we deploy our new server later this year. Next we show you how to script your newsletter.

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