[LRUG] Sending a newsletter from rails

[Jeremy Hoyland]

These are tasks we split, our apps (not Ruby -but that's immaterial)
send out password reminders &c. Newsletters are sent by an external
system/agency, Adestra in our case. We used to have an inhouse app that
did the newsletters but it reached the end of it's life and it is
frankly a lot easier to hive the problem off to someone who has already
solved it.

Whether it's right to do this for you will depend on you business, we
send several million newsletters/month -which is still do-able on an
internal app- but delivery times are critical e.g. 'must hit the clients
inbox by 12pm' and we have a marketing department that wants clean data
newsletter tracking, link tracking, open rates &c., &c.. Then there's
the problem of blacklisting -which the agency takes care of.
Additionally we lost a few hidden costs such as the mail server and it's
maintenance and bandwidth for the newsletters.

For a smaller business the above may not be a consideration, our
internal app served us well for a few years.

HTH 

Jeremy.