[LRUG] Sending a newsletter from rails

[Tom Stuart]

On 22 May 2008, at 09:46, Jeremy Hoyland wrote:
> 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.
> Whether it's right to do this for you will depend on you business

Another easily-overlooked issue is that of integration with an  
external platform like Adestra. In many cases it really is just a  
question of offloading the entire problem to someone who's already  
solved it (viz. deliverability, analytics etc), but increasingly  
people want to do more than blast out a single generic email to a  
hundred thousand customers, preferring instead a more customised/ 
personalised approach where each email is different (in a way more  
sophisticated than can be achieved with a simple blanks-filling mail  
merge), and so they either need to persuade third-party platforms to  
do this or concentrate on doing the whole job themselves.

If a newsletter really is just a newsletter then it makes sense to  
farm it out to an external platform and make the integration trivial  
(in many cases that's as mindless as CSV export) but as  
personalisation requirements increase it becomes more difficult and  
expensive to bend a generic platform to your whim and hence more  
attractive to do the email delivery in-house -- what you lose in  
deliverability/analytics headaches you gain in flexibility and  
control. Lots of the third-party email service providers do have quite  
rich interfaces for personalised content but of course you'll be  
making an investment in their platform if you use those interfaces,  
with all of the lock-in risks that entails.

Rails does have plenty of decent native solutions for this problem  
(ARMailer and BackgroundRb are only two) so it's worth thinking hard  
about the trade-offs between cost of integration, benefits of  
centralised control (personalisation, independence, futureproofing  
etc) and benefits of the rich functionality (deliverability, analytics  
etc) that you get from people whose only job is to deliver your email  
for you, and make a choice based on getting the greatest number of  
useful features for the lowest amount of hassle.

Cheers,
-Tom