It is interesting how a seemingly simple activity like sending out a season’s greeting could turn into a veritable marsh pit.

At Srijan, in the spirit of trying to do as much as possible in-house using open source software, we decided to install and use phplist (http://www.phplist.com/) to manage our newsletters.

Going by our experience, we find that even something as simple as sending newsletters needs to be managed meticulously and with extreme care. This is compounded by the fact that a mailer that goes out to everyone we know, is of extreme importance in portraying what we as a company are and do.

To start with, our phplist installation was on a shared hosting environment where we had little control over the SMTP server. Most shared hosting providers place heavy restrictions on mass mail campaigns, probably rightly so. However, the opaqueness in terms of being able to monitor mail logs leaves one in semi-darkness about what happens at the SMTP level. This led to a situation a few weeks ago, when old mailers that had been queued since our “sending limit” with the ISP had been exceeded, were processed and sent out at a much later date when the relevance of the mailers was nil.

Following this, we decided to host phplist on one of our own servers and use an SMTP server that we had complete control over. Now we were in a situation where we could monitor the status of mails and gain intelligence on the effectiveness of the mailers we were sending out; something we were unable to do earlier.

Having tested this setup internally within our organization and finding that it was ready for “prime-time” we decided to use this to send out our Christmas and New Year mailer.

After overcoming a few bottlenecks in importing contacts from SugarCRM into phplist, we proceeded to test the new mailer on ourselves. Now, while testing we had used test subject lines like “Happy0″, “Happy0.1″, “Happy0.2″ to be able to clearly differentiate our tests. When we had got to “Happy1″ we were ready to send it for real. Everything was hunky-dory.

One critical factor with phplist is that for every change you make in the mailer creation form, you need to hit “Save” before moving to another tab to assign a mailing list to the mailer.

On the final change from “Happy1″ to “Happy Holidays from Srijan” we had failed to hit that famous “Save” button. The result? About 1600 of our most valued people, clients, partners, mentors and fans received a mailer with a lousy subject line.

The good side, If I can call it that, is that since we now have a robust tech setup for the mailers, we know exactly how many of those 1600 people received our mailer, how many of them viewed it and how many clicked on each of the links in the mailer.

Life, as we know, is not perfect; but the fundamental step in the direction of perfection is the acceptance of failure.

Having encountered and accepted these failures, we are on our way to improving things some more by:

1. Creating a simple checklist that the person who sends the mailer will need to mark off before sending a mailer.
2. Trying to remove the human element by extending phplist so that a zip archive containing the HTML file and any associated media can be uploaded to a folder, which is then picked up by phplist.
3. Creating a simple workflow involving more than one human to ensure that the mailer has been seen by more than a pair of eyes to identify errors.
4. Automated testing of how the mailer is rendered in multiple (the most common) browsers and mail clients.

With these changes in place, we hope that the next time around there will be lesser room for error.

We, at Srijan are constantly learning and are proud of it. If you have any anecdotes or comments related to this, you are most welcome to post them here.