1.5M user's mailing list cleanup and Verify email IDs

[mehargags]

Hi
In one of our ongoing projects we have a 1.5 million user's subscriber list.
We are going in for double opt-in sign up, but right now the sign up is single opt-in where someone can enter his email ID to become a member. Problem is -- people for fun sometimes use email ID's like abc@Xyz.com which is an undeliverable email ID. This bloats our email list alot and increases our BounceRate.
Can you suggest what we can do to CLEAN up out mailing list ? and Verify all email IDs to be Valid and Deliverable ?
I’ve contacted some third party Email address verification services and the price point they quoted is way beyond my budget.
Can you suggest a cost effective price point for verifying 1.5 Million Email IDs.


Also will PHP list be a viable solution for this amount of mailing ?

[danwaterloo]

Hello!

For the cleanup, you have three options:
1. Use a third party
2. Write your own code to verify the addresses
3. Run a very slow campaign with phplist (100 an hour or so ) and have your bounce rules set to blacklist or unsubscribe with one bounce.

Your campaign could ask people to click on a link in the email to confirm they still want to be on a list, and then the system will send them a confirmation email that they will have to click on, so they are then double opt in.

Yes, phpList, if configured properly on appropriate hardware, can handle 1.5M emails.

Dan

[mehargags]

Thanks Dan...
I will look into it.

Can you also suggest Hardware config to choose from ?
I want to go cheap on a VPS (KVM) so suggest how much RAM should be appropriate for this

[danwaterloo]

I'm not sure what the minimums are, but remember that you are running:
- A web server
- php scripts
- a database with 1.5 million users (and all the other data associated with them)
- an email server

I would recommend as much as possible... 8Gb or more to run everything. (64 bit os), about 100Gb drive (min), and 4 or more cores on the cpu