For as long as I can remember the standard mail merge process has always been one dimensional in that you are doing little more than poking holes in your document and filling them in with a flat data source of some sort.  Which is wonderful for non-technical people looking to send out a quick email to their list and fill in a couple fields to make the email more personal.  But while easy for non-technical people to use, doesn’t usually meet the needs of more complex email that needs to be sent out, like invoices which need modern programming features such as loops and conditional statements.

The other type of email templates that my readers are probably more familiar with is the ones their applications send, the ones that contains those loops and conditional statements that create 99% of the transaction email that we all receive each day.  However this type of email, while very powerful, because it has all the benefits of a modern programming language, usually falls short when a non-technical marketing-type wants to get in and change some wording or update the design.  This usually gets done, but at a much slower pace than it should happen, because meetings, development, tests, and pushes to production have to happen, when a simple word needs to be changed.  So that is not optimal for non-technical types who simply want to do their jobs and not be involved in the development process more than they have to.

Who cares about what?

The technical side of the email templating process (i.e. the developers), if you break it down to the bare essentials, only care about the data that needs to be pulled together to merge in to the email that needs to be sent out for each individual customer.

The non-technical side of the email templating process (i.e. the marketers) only care about the message that is being delivered to the customers, they don’t necessarily care about the data that is being merged in, because they are treating the message as a generic template for talking to all their customers.

What can be done?

In a optimal world the developers would compile the data they need to merge in to the email template, not caring anything about design, formatting, or output, and then pass it off to the marketers to put in their optimal format for talking to their customers, because they would control the formatting and design.  However as I eluded to in the beginning of this post, most transactional email today, requires a modern programming language that supports loops and conditional statements. So what can be done?  Both sides seem to need each other, developers for the data, marketers for the design, and somewhere in between to turn the whole thing in to a production quality transactional email.

Well it is time we take a step forward and bring this problem to some Web 2.0 thinking.  If developers and designers can collaborate over a web page and both work on it simultaneously and produce work in a fraction of the time it took 10 years ago, we should be able to bring that same thinking to email templating. 

Stay tuned!!

Note

I cannot endorse the SocketLabs service anymore. Everything below works with any SMTP service. If you would like great alternatives please give the people at:

• Postmark a try for transaction email
• or if you need to send bulk email please try out SendGrid

On my server I run the typical assortment of applications that is on any true developers servers. I have PHP for my blog, ASP.NET MVC for my side projects, and a couple scheduled tasks that include backups and other things. All of these applications and tasks have different places to configure their default SMTP relay, and it was really getting out of hand, but I had gotten use to changing them all when the need arose, and usually I just defaulted them to the IIS localhost, because it was easy.

I knew the downfalls of using the default localhost and the potential mail delivery problems if I didn’t properly set the DomainKey, DKIM, SPF, SenderID, Reverse PTR, and blah blah blah. But it wasn’t really worth the hassle for me to properly set all this, because I can count the number of emails sent from my server on one hand each day. And a 4 out of 5 times they were administrative emails sent to my Gmail account. But given all that it is still no excuse for poor email hygiene.

Recently I learned about an unknown “feature”, at least to me, called smart host in the settings of the IIS localhost SMTP server. Which seems like it would solve all my problems, with very little effort, when I combined it with a Cloud Based High Deliverability SMTP Relay. This combination of the Cloud and a Smart Host would provide me the following:

1. Keep all my applications pointing at the localhost SMTP built in to IIS
2. Provide a higher deliverability
3. Properly sign my emails with DKIM and SPF
4. And setup a Reverse PTR for higher delivery to services that require it.
5. And give me the wonderful benefit of analytics for my emails sent each day, analytics is like candy to developers, at least for me. Nothing better than a graph in my opinion

Getting Started

First things first you need to sign up for an SMTP Relay, I choose the Free SMTP Relay provided by SocketLabs Email On-Demand which is a High Deliverability Cloud-Based SMTP Relay to get the job done. Signup was easy, and they had my cloud SMTP server verified and provisioned in less than 24 hours.

Next make sure SMTP is installed on your local Windows box. I am not going to go through this part because it varies greatly between Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 R2. But if you really need help try this site.

Now lets setup the smart host using our SMTP Relay provided by SocketLabs. To set up a smart host:

1. In IIS Manager, right-click the SMTP virtual server, and then click Properties.

2. Click the Delivery tab, and click Advanced.

3. In the Smart host box, type the name of the smart host server. In this case it is “smtp1000.socketlabs-od.com” You can type a string to represent a name or enter an IP address.

4. Click OK and then click Outbound Security on the Delivery tab. And enter in your authentication credentials sent to you by SocketLabs.

5. We are done

Using Your Smart Host

As I indicated before, this was an easy transition, because I didn’t have to change anything in my applications or tasks. They still all point to localhost, but now instead of localhost trying to deliver the mail, it just relays the SMTP request to my Free SocketLabs account.

For the geeks like me who like a little verification that all this is working as it should be, here is the email header from a comment email I received from this blog:

DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; d=socketlabs-od.com;i=@socketlabs-od.com;s=key2443;
    c=relaxed/relaxed; q=dns/txt; t=1285951803; x=1288543803;
    h=subject:to:date:from:message-id:mime-version:content-transfer-encoding:content-type;
    bh=NGN3BWusyQrG7TOAXx0uG/B+BoM=;
    b=sI9CfJrL7qM32wEtzfjxPIkZqsxeTRp7FLRZ1n5lLd1rVgDJzMlNyVhrE8BikBih7lxrKjm3HHZOFLVzQNeVmay4KuUyge/xv1wLxTnTmDUA5jbqt5Mh9vStc4cd4x6zz3zEJTqqLbzgtFN9C6LKiSUBpb3g4m/tqwk62OlBU94=
Received: from server ([69.59.171.172]) by mxsp2.email-od.com with ESMTP; Fri, 1 Oct 2010 12:50:02 -0400
Received: from server ([127.0.0.1]) by server with Microsoft SMTPSVC(7.5.7600.16385); Fri, 1 Oct 2010 09:49:00 -0700
Subject: [Nick Berardi's Coder Journal] Please moderate: "You're Invited To Code Camp 2010.2"
To: nick@coderjournal.com
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2010 16:49:00 +0000
Return-Path: wordpress@coderjournal.com
From: WordPress <wordpress@coderjournal.com>

As you can see on line 7 the message was sent to my local host server, and then on line 6 relayed to the SocketLabs Email On-Demand Server.

And here is my favorite part, the emails show up on the graph.

Note: If you have never setup a localhost SMTP server on Windows before. Make sure that you grant “127.0.0.1” or “localhost” the ability to relay mail through the localhost server. Sounds odd, but this is a necessary step in my experience. To do this click the Access tab, click the Relay button, click the Add button, and then enter the IP address “127.0.0.1” in to the IP Address text box, and click OK. Then just keep clicking OK to exit out of the properties screen.

Update (2010-10-25): If you find that your SMTP Relay is being blocked by your residential service provider or GoDaddy please read my updated post on how you can get around this using alternative outbound ports in the smart host.