In other news, Mr Kitty the cat took a poo in his favorite litter box, exiling 7 grains of sand from their family in the process who remained in the litter box, many now clinging to feces.
When Mr. Kitty was asked for comment, he hid under the bed.
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P.S. Don't they normally reserve crunchnotes for this sort of irrelevant petty bullshit?
We're planning on sending 1 daily email to each subscriber. Let's say we want to be prepared for sending 100,000+ per day.
We're currently on rackspace's cloudservers, so we have no problem spinning a separate instance for a mail server. Just needed some guidance in terms of setting up the server and start mailing.
Can you point me to a resource where I can do some reading and educate myself a bit more?
My two cents(I've managed email campaigns to ~100k people):
Sending one email per day to everyone is a lot of mail to be sending your users. You better have a really, really good reason to do so--and those emails better provide significant value to your users, otherwise they will opt out, possibly even report as spam.
I don't know what business you are in, but only certain businesses can really get away with sending that much email--ie Groupon, Gilt, etc.--and that is because those emails provide a lot of value and meet a lot of needs. If you fall in the category of a business who can send that much email awesome!
If possible I think it is best to use a tiered, opt-in subscription model. Some example tiers: "Daily Deals Beat", "Weekly Rundown", "2-Week Summary", and "Monthly Newsletter"(these names suck I know). You can present these options as part of the sign-up process, or better yet, when they click the sign up confirmation email take them to a settings to opt-in to the various tiers. This is also good to have as the landing page for when someone clicks unsubscribe in your email. Take them to this settings page where they can adjust the level of contact, or unsubscribe completely, that is right for them. If you are sending one message a day chances are you will have a lot of people hitting that unsubscribe link, and some might not want to totally discontinue contact so give them options to adjust as well as totally unsubscribe.
In terms of sending the mail, you'll need some kind of simple app to talk to the smtp server, for example a rails app that uses ActiveMailer. If you're familiar with rails, this will help: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionMailer/Base.html
Though there are probably even simpler services that can talk to SMTP servers even better, as rails is sort of a lot of overhead just for actionmailer.
One of the reasons I'd prefer to run it in-house is because users' emails are valuable data and we prefer to keep it with us rather than outsource to something like Aweber.
Another reason is the cost. Once email lists get into the tens of thousands, it becomes expensive to have someone else like Aweber handle them. I have a feeling it'd be cheaper to run it in-house. I don't really have any hard data to prove this of course, just assuming based on the fact that most startups do it this way.
Finally, based on the little bit that I've read, it's the initial setup (servers, IPs, subscribe/unsubscribe requests) that takes effort. But once it's automated, things will be humming along nicely, provided there's regular periodic monitoring of course.
I'm pretty sure startups run email delivery in-house for the reasons above and more. Take Groupon for example - I'd be willing to bet they do it in-house.
The only real shame in this case is that HN is becoming a place for people to air their trivial meta nonsense.
You got an unwanted piece of email? Take a second to mark it as spam and be done with it. Sweet mother of god, you got it via HN?? Once again, take the exact same second to mark it as spam and be done it. But don't assume that it affects the big scheme of things concerning HN, because it doesn't. A single company trolling for emails is orthogonal to the evolution/erosion of HN.
P.S. You're feeling 'sad'? This is all it takes to make you feel sad? Jesus.
I've posted it because I think it's another marker that points to the continuing change here on HN. Yes, I've marked the email as spam, although not processed it the usual way because it is close to stuff I do for real. I've now made a tweak to the spam processing so that the email address I use here now requires the marker I name in my profile, rather than just being a hint. Sure, it took me 10 seconds to read the email, decide it was spam, check the source, adjust the filtering, and move on.
Submitting this item has let me see that others have got it, it is bulk, and to measure the expectation. At a casual glance it seems that most of the longer serving contibutors are saying the same thing - it's a shame, and it's a sign of the decline on HN. Most of the newer contributors are saying the same thing - welcome to the internet, why should you expect anything different?
The correlation isn't 100%, but it seems to be real. If I get time later I might actually go away and find out what the correlation coefficent really is.
But for now, it's information about those who visit/inhabit HN. If you don't find it interesting then you could take one second to sigh and move on, shaking your head about the sad state of people who post trivial meta nonsense.
PS: I'm not feeling suicidally depressed, but it has had an overall negative impact on my day. That's why I'm going off and doing more programming - that cheers me up.
Basically, he thinks that news sites like Reddit/HN/etc are doomed to become tabloids, since their author's incentives are all screwed up.
The format of the post is a trick to both get on the front page of HN, and prove his point - that you're more interested in fighting and gossip than real information.
I get the impression he has a chip on his shoulder in general. My first and only interaction with him was on a Reddit thread: some folks, including myself, disgreed with one of his blog posts. He replied to the comments that disagreed with him insultingly, calling people names and such. Then, after a day or so, he deleted his comments after the fact to protect his rep.
not to protect my rep, to avoid a personal problem I have, which is an overwhelming compulsion to have the last word in every discussion. I can get just about anybody to agree with me if I spend enough time to find out what mistake they made when they misinterpreted my words, and I have a really hard time accepting that people are going to say things about me which are inaccurate or illogical. so I end up wasting a lot of time arguing with people who never bothered to read what I was saying carefully in the first place.
I created this account so I could come on here and correct these comments. I had to create a new account because I threw out my HN password about a week or two ago in hopes of staying out of these kinds of discussions. I don't know which specific incident on Reddit of deleting my comments and/or my account you're referring to, because I've done that many times, but it probably involved wasted time or inadequate explanation on my part and poor logic on the part of several other people.
it's basically a failure of discipline and priority-setting on my part. I'm getting better at it, though.
From people like you perhaps. In which case, knock yourself out.
I do agree that TWIST maintains a high quality of guests tho.