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Bulk e-mail attachments or links to online filesHow to use Maxprog products Maxprog's Blog |
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Bulk e-mail attachments or links to online files |
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You have to send a message to your subscribers and send a couple of PDF documents. Is it better to use bulk e-mail attachments or links to online files? MaxBulk Mailer fully supports attachments, but except in very particular cases, I would recommend not to send attachments as part of a bulk email campaign. I mean all of them, whether they are PDFs, Word files, Excel files, or pictures.  There are several reasons for that, but I will talk about the most important ones (in my opinion) for you and your recipients: Bulk e-mail attachments, Message size, and delivery speedIf you add attachments to your message, you have to be very careful about the total size of the files, especially when sending individual messages (the default), because you will send as many times that size during the delivery.That means sending a 250 KB attachment to 1,000 recipients will generate 250 MB traffic! As SMTP servers use to give around 2KB/s bandwidth per client, your delivery will take up to 35 hours to complete! SecurityIf you are like me, you are getting more and more spam with attachments. There is a natural proliferation of such messages. If you don't know the person sending you the email, you don't open the file, even if you are curious. You delete it.Indeed, opening an attachment may potentially infect a computer, so your recipients have to really know who you are. For example, even a PDF file may launch any command on the operating system after user confirmation (popup message). Different command lines may be specified for Windows, Unix, and Mac. A PDF file may also contain attached files, which can be extracted and opened from the reader. That may be used to hide malicious executables to bypass some antivirus and content analysis engines. Server firewalls tempering / virus checkingThere are servers, especially corporate servers whose firewalls will almost universally block various types of email attachments.Typically they do it based on a combination of simple type matching rules (.exe, .pdf...), some heuristic checking such as sourcing or destination based on the feedback of subscribed blacklists or virus checking. It is not always the firewall that does this, it can be a plugin or add-on device to the email gateway. Various companies sell specialized devices. Good ones, will notify the recipient and allow them to approve or disapprove the receipt of the attachment. Some others just drop them, even PDFs... Your recipients may not like e-mail attachmentsThere are people that don't like to receive attachments directly in their mailbox. Maybe because of the message size or maybe because they have a slow internet connection, they like to have the choice to download your files or not.So, in conclusion, and as I said before, better avoid sending attachments, better make them available online uploading them to your web site. You can then add links to your message so your subscribers only have to click on those links to download the files. I believe it is the best method.
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