GroupMail customers have a need for speed. Delivering to large lists of recipients takes time, especially when you’re dealing with non-optimal environments. In a previous post on this blog, we discussed how hiding the GroupMail Delivery Console can help to speed up delivery. Another way to get things moving a little faster is using Bulk Sending instead of Personlized Sending. I asked Honor Doyle from Infacta’s technical support team a few questions about Bulk Sending:

Tom: Hi Honor. I’ve had a few calls recently from customers looking to turbo-charge their delivery with GroupMail. I’ve read about Bulk Sending, but I’m not really sure about how it differs from Personalized Sending. Could you explain?

Honor: Bulk Sending or BCC’ing only ever sends one message to your SMTP server and then it sends the list of addresses to distribute the message to. For this example lets enter 10 recipients per message. This basically means that for every 1 message sent from GroupMail it will go to 10 recipients. The default is 10 recipients per message and 100 is the maximum number of recipients per message.With Personalized Send Mode, it sends an individual message for each recipient in your Group. These messages can be personalized using the Merge Fields, for example ‘Dear First Name’ etc.. which is not available with the Bulk Send Mode.

Tom: What are the benefits of sending with bulk send mode?

Honor: It is much faster at sending, as in the example above for every one message that is sent from GroupMail to the SMTP Server, this is then sent to 10 recipients, rather than having to send 10 indvidual messages from GroupMail. Although this results in less personalized messages, as everyone sees the same text, it can speed up delivery also. The main benifit here is speed.

The other advantage is if your ISP limits the number of messages you can send per day, then using the Bulk Send Mode can help here, for example if they limit you to 100 messages and you send 100 messages using the Bulk Send Mode with 10 recipients per message this is infact 1,000 messages you are actually sending.

Tom: Are there any downsides?

Honor: Yes, you can’t personalize the message in any way using the Merge Fields.You can only use this sending mode when using the Standard Delivery Option, it is not supported in any of the other delivery options, such as Direct Send Mode. Also,some mail servers tend to treat bulk sent messages as spam and may filter them or place them in a junk folder.

Tom: How do I use Bulk Send Mode if I want to test it out?

Honor: To use Bulk Send Mode in GroupMail 5, prepare your message for delivery, select your group and click “Send” when ready. Then, on the “Prepare to Send” screen click the button marked [...] beside the ‘Address To’ Field. Then from the Address Type you can select either “Personalized” or “Bulk” here. Select “Bulk”, then enter the Number of Recipients per message and the text that you want to appear in the To Field. Its a good idea to check that your ISP will allow this sending mode also.

Tom: Thanks Honor. It’s certainly worth testing out.

Honor: I hope it helps. If you need anything else just let me know, thanks.