atomicbird

Some of you will recall that I had some trouble with hosting my customer mailing list back in August and ended up moving it to a new hosting company. I don't actually use the mailing list all that often, so that's kind of where things have rested since then. DadaMail was installed and running at TextDrive, and people could subscribe and unsubscribe, but I hadn't actually sent anything to the list since.

Until this week, when I decided to send out an announcement about the 5 year anniversary. And... it worked perfectly, no problems whatsoever. Of course I could have said the same thing when it was hosted at Pair, except that this time I have explicit permission to use the software.

The only unexpected minor detail was my own fault. With DadaMail (and probably with competing tools) you avoid swamping the mail server by having messages sent in batches. That is, send X messages every Y minutes. After consulting with TextDrive support I set this at 25 messages every minute.

That works, but it can take a long time if the list is big. Like, ((number of subscribers) / 25) minutes in this case. Hours and hours, in my case.

The problem? Don't use words like "today" in a message unless you're sure you'll actually be able to send all of the messages before the day ends.

My customer mailing list rose from the dead today. At least for subscribe/unsubscribe processing. I don't (yet) have anything new to send to the list, but the software's installed and seems to be working normally. You'll see that the form has returned to the sidebar of this page.

Those who have been following along know that recently my customer mailing list got smacked down by my web hosting company (pair.com). They don't like customers installing their own mailing list software (I use Dada Mail), and I didn't like their option (GNU MailMan). See my previous blog entry for the full story.

• Running a Customer Mailing list

A second (online) home

After some looking around I decided to move the mailing list to TextDrive. Since I got into trouble for using Dada Mail at Pair, I made sure to describe my needs exactly and make sure they were cool with them. They were, so I signed up. I haven't moved the whole web site over to TextDrive, though.

Yet.

Pair's got a good track record in most regards, but my account with TextDrive isn't some kind of Dada Mail-only plan. I could move atomicbird.com there if I wanted. I don't know that I will, but until recent Dada Mail-related events I wasn't even looking at other hosting options. If TextDrive proves reliable I might decide to consolidate hosting at some point.

Moving the list to TextDrive took a little longer than it might have because I want the setup to appear as seamless as possible. I don't want my web site to be atomicbird.com and have the mailing list be at some entirely different domain. With some help from TextDrive support I set up lists.atomicbird.com as a DNS "A" record pointing to my TextDrive hosting account. Right now the only thing there is Dada Mail, which hasn't even been configured to look like the rest of this site yet. I think having everything be something.atomicbird.com makes it all look a little nicer.

That wouldn't have been hard except for TextDrive's unusual virtual server setup. TextDrive uses Virtualmin for virtual server setup, which I've never seen before. Following TextDrive support's instructions got lists.atomicbird.com set up normally. It also caused a bizarre situation in which my Dada Mail setup (and pretty much everything else of mine at TextDrive) could send email everywhere except addresses at atomicbird.com. And going the other way, email to my TextDrive account would bounce if the sender was from atomicbird.com, but not for other senders.

I asked TextDrive support, basically, "WTF is the deal with Virtualmin, huh?". They said it would set up Apache virtual servers, which I guess is a true but certainly not complete answer. Just looking through the TextDrive control panel, it includes settings for email accounts, MySQL, Subversion, and a whole bunch of other stuff. And in any case there's nothing about an Apache virtual server that would have any effect on email. It seems to be working now, though.

Cargo cult web design

Not really a MacAs an aside, the visual aspect of TextDrive's Virtualmin has been customized in an obvious imitation of Mac OS X. Lots of icons, a menu bar across the top, and even a Spotlight logo to get to the "search" feature. It's an odd and confusing choice. It doesn't actually work like a Mac in most regards, but you get all the visual cues that suggest maybe it should.

Take it for a spin

The list should be functional, though currently idle. If you're not on it, I invite you to sign up. If you are signed up, I invite you to unsubscribe and resubscribe just to see how it all works. When the Mac to School promotion kicks off (soon, I hope) I may have something to send to people. That'll be the real test-- sending a few thousand emails, in a bunch of different batches, and hoping it all holds together.

For a little more than three years now I've used a mailing list to keep in touch with customers and others interested in my software. This has been incredibly useful for me. Although early adopters and digerati and such have mostly moved toward things like RSS feeds, I still find that a significant portion of my customers get most of their information the (relatively) old fashioned way.

If you look around the site as of today though, you'll see there's no way to sign up. And therein lies a tale. This is kind of a long post, so you'll need to actually click through to the post to get the whole story.