[LRUG] Sending a newsletter from rails

[Kevin Fullerton]

Joel Chippindale wrote:
> I am working on a rails app which needs to be able to send a newsletter
> out to tens of thousands of subscribers. I would ideally like the same
> system to be able to handle taking individual emails (e.g. password
> reminders) out of the request/response loop.
> 
> Has anyone on the list tackled this problem before? If so what did you
> opt for and how did it work out?

I'm thinking about a similar system at the moment, though looking at
sending mail to hundreds of subscribers, but potentially multiple times
a day - my thought was to build up the template of the message and pass
that along with all the individual contact details to a background DRb
process, so that the main Rails app wasn't blocked by the mailing
process.  Unfortunately I haven't got too far down the road of seeing if
that's a viable, reliable way of doing it (handling SMTP errors,
bounce-backs etc.)

Kevin