Need help with Drupal bulk mail low open rate for legitimate mailing list

Posted by Ron Williams on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ron Williams
Published on 2010-06-02T22:20:37Z Indexed on 2010/06/02 22:24 UTC
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I've moved from constant contact to Drupal Simplenews/Mimemail/SMTP. Previously the open rate was around 50% for constant contact, but now it's 4-5% for the same list via the mentioned setup. Mail is getting out from the server, but it's having an issue anyway.

Here's the setup: -The e-mail list consists of approximately 80,000 addresses which is queued at 10,000 e-mails per cron run (which runs hourly).

-The server is a Dual Core2Quad machine with 2GB of RAM.

-When mail is being sent, the mail queue will usually go up to ~1000 at the beginning of the hour before reducing to ~250 by the time the next cron occurs.

-Newsletter is themed to display custom style for newsletter on send

-Newsletter is received by some, but appears to be bounced by many (based on low open rate_

-I've added SPF, domain keys, and a PTR record to the DNS

-Server hostname (listed in ptr) is different from hosted domain

-Very low spam number via Spamassassin

-IP and domain are not blacklisted

-Mail goes out via SMTP module on delivery.

Any ideas?

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