CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hola CCRM friends,

I am a software engineer that is a part of the Urban Alliance for Sustainability cooperative (http://www.uas.coop).  We have been using a custom, high performance CiviMail newsletter SMTP back-end with much success and now we are contemplating opening the back-end as a service for the CiviCRM community.  ( if anyone is wondering, we are not using the postfix / amavisd set up ) .  So, we are coming to the community to gauge interest in this type of service. What follows is a brief description of what we are contemplating and then some questions to the community. Any and all feedback is welcome.

Basically, what the service means is that any person managing a constituency with CiviCRM would have access to a powerful back-end that will support the CiviMail component without having to install and manage any additional software themselves.

The service would provide the following:

   1. An SMTP relay backend that would handle all of the newsletters and emails that are sent from CiviMail.  We are not going to handle any internal organizational email.
   2. A system for handling the subscribes, un-subscribes, bounce, confirm, opt-out, and replies to newsletters
   3. nothing else.

The service would be simple, reliable and fast.

All one would have to do to take advantage of the service is become a subscriber and then point their CiviCRM SMTP configuration at our SMTP and voila! instant, high performance newsletter.  yum yum.

So here are the questions: (Any and all feedback is welcome)

   1. Does something like what is described above seem useful to the community?
   2. If you are currently sending a newsletter, how many do you send per month?  If not, but are contemplating it, what volume do you expect?
   3. Would you be willing to pay a very small fee for the service? There are two models; either pay a subscription for access or pay a per use fee based on bandwidth utilization.
   4. If you are a developer,  would your clients be willing to pay a fee?


My contact info is below. Thx for the feedback!

Shane Hill
shane@uas.coop
IM:  shanehill00@[google, yahoo, or msn]

Thx for the pointer, I will post to the email lists as well.

As far as components are concerned, we are using a modified version of QPSMTPD as the SMTPD to deal with unwanted relays, spam, etc. we also use it to help manage our "redundant, low delay" mail queues.

http://smtpd.develooper.com/

we modified it to fit our needs.

For the MTA, we are using postfix

And for the handling of the responses and sub, unsub notifications, we created our own in-house queue daemons and workers that we collectively call CORBUS (Confirm, Optout, Reply, Bounce, Unsubscribe, Subscribe).  The name was either corbus or "frozen yogurt", I went with corbus.

So a quick list is Perl, Mysql, Postfix, QPSMTPD and a great little heartbeat monitor in PHP.

We intend to make available any software that we have created for free use as soon as we can do so.

thanks again,

-Shane

I'd be interested enough to investigate.  Honestly it depends on what you consider a small fee.  It could be worth it even for a cash strapped nonprofit given the complexity of getting civimail up and running.

I know I said I would have more info up by yesterday,  but things have gotten delayed by a day or two.  I can say that we are going to launch a beta program and that details are forthcoming.  so keep your browsers tuned.

-Shane

CCRM Friends,

This is an announcement that the UAS CiviSMTP Beta will be launching on Tuesday, July 17th.

The beta will run for 4 weeks.  At any time anyone who wants to get involved just needs to sign up here and we will get you going.

http://www.uas.coop/smtp-beta-test

We are offering a free one month subscription to the service once it is launched for all those that help us test the service.  The registered testers so far are as follows: (we have 8 registered testers total,  the 4 below have have given explicit permission to list the names of their orgs):

The Green Party of Canada - http://www.greenparty.ca
Bristol Exploration Club - http://bec-cave.org.uk
Freemantle Environmental Resource Network - http://fern.org.au
Civic Craft - http://www.civiccraft.net/

http://www.tears.org was registered, but due to some hosting restrictions they had to pull out.  But they did offer much help and input, which is greatly appreciated!

--

One other great thing that will come out of the beta test will be YACS (Yet Another Civimail Solution).  YACS will be a software package for installing a robust and what we hope is an "easier to manage" Civimail back end.   We are aiming to create a 2 step process for getting a CiviMail back end installation up and running:

   1. install Postfix - just a generic install - ASAP (As Simple As Possible)
   2. execute the YACS install script and follow the prompts - YACS will fix up your Postfix and install all of the software necessary for the CiviMail backend.

And we are looking at ways to do away with Postfix all together and maybe make this whole thing a module that can be installed in Joomla or Drupal and run from shared hosting environments not just dedicated or vps envs.  But that is still down the road a bit.

The main aim here being that we want to make CiviMail as easy and accessible as possible as we believe at UAS that newsletters are a powerful tool for the civic / npo space and would like to help out.

peace,

Shane - It's really exciting to see this project moving forward. AND YACS sounds like a great addition to the platform.

Hi CCRM Friends,

In the spirit of transparency, This is an update to let everyone know what has been going on with the beta.

We have processed over 200,000 emails so far without any problems through the UAS SMTP service system. (there were some minor issues, however, that are explained below)

If anyone else wants to test, the beta period will be open for two more weeks.  you can sign up here:

http://www.uas.coop/smtp-beta

pricing details are forthcoming.

peace,

-Shane

==================================
A description of the issues we encountered follows.  Most of the issues can be attributed to our email simulator (which is not a part of the service) and are not a reflection of the service quality.  The simulator simulates (of course) the bounces, replies, unsubs, subs, etc.     at times it was problematic and would not simulate correctly.

   1. at first, I distributed bad test data that made a bunch of test "optout" addresses look like bounces.  I accidentally used the string 'optput' instead of 'optout'  in the test email addresses.  I fixed the simulator to recognize optput as an optout and all was good.

   2. An upgrade was made to the simulator that introduced a bug so only the bounces were recognized and all other addresses were considered "good". That problem was fixed and we have not had any other issues since.

   3. We had some disconnections occur on the larger mailings (10,000+)  due to network problems.  I think this issue is going to be addressed in version 1.8 or 2.0 of CCRM via  batching mechanism whereby UAS will download the batch of emails that need to be sent and then send them.  this should be much more efficient.

-Shane

I need to clarify the pricing:

$0.03 / 10 emails.

thx

-Shane